tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60287390138442774022024-03-17T05:17:47.761-04:00Studio Brulé Blog Hot topics: News, Documentary,
Film, and EntertainmentSteve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.comBlogger116125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-40412488845293191422024-02-21T11:10:00.000-05:002024-02-21T11:10:00.237-05:00The Apocalypse – Where is God?<div>Over my 22 years as a chemist in research at Dow Chemical and DuPont I worked with many scientists and engineers, and although scientists are some of the most interesting and open-minded people that I've ever met, they are prone to dismiss as fantasy any idea that cannot be put to an equation or test. They nurture the quality of objective detachment that is necessary for, and reinforced by, the discipline of science. But this can be problematic when extended to their thoughts and feelings about themselves and their relationships because life is a subjective experience that demands its own language – the language of literature, philosophy and religion.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oDlrxXmjLqo" width="320" youtube-src-id="oDlrxXmjLqo"></iframe></div><br /><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div>The psychological commitment to a purely objective worldview can lead scientists to become trapped in a labyrinth of theories that exist only in the mind, and this can happen to such a degree that some are thought to suffer from <a href="https://the-gist.org/2014/11/the-autism-spectrum-are-scientists-at-the-top-end/" target="_blank">high-functioning autism</a>. This may be part occupational hazard and part prerequisite for high level science, and I struggled with it myself until my early thirties at which time I had, what Alan Watts called, an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wi7Wtocj9M" target="_blank">encounter with cosmic consciousness</a>. I have tried, and failed, to articulate that experience periodically over the past 30 years but I may try to describe it again in a future essay.</div><div><br /></div><div>The fundamentalist believer can be equally trapped, but in this case by his refusal to use his own critical faculties. He adopts wholesale the religion of a people from the inaccessible past in its literal form and, no matter how much cognitive dissonance must be endured, he asserts that his religion has captured reality in a book. But, stripped of its metaphors and allegorical meaning, his religion becomes a dogma without sustenance or capacity to act as a reliable guide to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-realization" target="_blank">self-realization</a> (the Western secular version of <a href="https://blog.bhaktimarga.org/self-realisation-vs-god-realisation" target="_blank">oneness with God</a>), serving only to distract his ego from the unfortunate's own soul rather than point him in that direction. Thus the fundamentalist dismisses God even more resoundingly than the scientist.</div><div><br /></div><div>Furthermore, the lack of consensus about what is even meant by “God” is a source of conflict to such a degree that even the sound of the word can evoke a visceral reaction in those who have had a bad experience with religion, causing them to close their minds to anything that follows. Having discarded all concepts of God, they seek meaning in other ideological movements, like Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Feminism, Environmentalism, or their career, in order to fill the void. These become the center of their lives, serving as substitute gods. </div><div><br /></div><div>To compound this problem, the stunning success of the scientific enterprise can lend credence to the presumption that science can ascertain absolute truth and that nothing can escape its grasp. Some top scientists even believe that one day we will know <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC7RQYFwtHg" target="_blank">everything there is to know about reality</a>, which is an act of faith in human reason as the supreme power: the god of science and the enlightenment.</div><div><br /></div><div>I intend to expose the fallacy that we can package reality into a tidy box, whether scientific or religious, and to do so we will have to consider recent research into the nature of consciousness since that is where all of our theories and ideas about reality, and God, reside. Along the way I hope that you will reflect upon what you think that you know for sure because certainty closes the mind and leads us astray.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: large;">Consciousness</span></div><div><br /></div><div>I sometimes refer to our conventional notion of consciousness as “ego consciousness” in order to distinguish it from the observer/decider whose existence is implied by the work of neurologist Andrew Budson from the <a href="https://www.bumc.bu.edu/busm/2022/10/03/new-explanation-for-consciousness/" target="_blank">Boston University School of Medicine</a>, who wrote:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>“Consciousness developed as a memory system that is used by our unconscious brain to help us flexibly and creatively imagine the future and plan accordingly.” </div><div><br /></div><div>“<a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xjbn3/consciousness-is-just-a-bunch-of-hallucinations-we-collectively-agree-on" target="_blank">We don’t perceive the world, make decisions, or perform actions directly. Instead, we do all these things unconsciously and then—about half a second later—consciously remember doing them.</a>”</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-UmhcbnpzVlH_vaB2LAVkzadZtIGtGGzlp3aaQuWY71anlXS8Rp7QLQ4Y8aOL0NNP6ekOC5NF5EwoVdugJD1Q4GlxnC6xpq-pXNklzpDHvmEwGhEt46Wdd1Hk2ae6lyUJfVo7VuhL_jBvKlO2myO5dvNxeaR0bUz_zJDgaTqo0IZy2ihy_PDtNrjs4Zxs/s864/SBF-230511%20Andrew%20Budson%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="836" data-original-width="864" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-UmhcbnpzVlH_vaB2LAVkzadZtIGtGGzlp3aaQuWY71anlXS8Rp7QLQ4Y8aOL0NNP6ekOC5NF5EwoVdugJD1Q4GlxnC6xpq-pXNklzpDHvmEwGhEt46Wdd1Hk2ae6lyUJfVo7VuhL_jBvKlO2myO5dvNxeaR0bUz_zJDgaTqo0IZy2ihy_PDtNrjs4Zxs/w200-h194/SBF-230511%20Andrew%20Budson%20b.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andrew Budson</td></tr></tbody></table>The unconscious is invoked here to mean “whence we know not,” and Budson refrains from speculation. However, the discovery of this half second delay delivers a fatal blow to the popular assumption that your conscious self is you. Consciousness, being only a useful memory system, is thus a persistent hallucination of reality, like a dream that reboots every morning.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The mind is also part of this persistent hallucination, as the researchers further explain in their detailed paper published in the Journal of the <a href="https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/Fulltext/2022/12000/Consciousness_as_a_Memory_System.5.aspx" target="_blank">Society for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology, December 2022</a>, </div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">“Consciousness was subsequently co-opted to produce other functions that are not directly relevant to memory per se, such as problem-solving, abstract thinking, and language.”</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>It seems clear that we can infer the existence of an observer who decides and acts in the moment – something akin to the synergistic whole of your being. I suggest that we use the traditional religious word, “soul” to refer to this observer/decider and consider it to be the “real you.” But I don't believe that it is truly unconscious; the soul has its own form of consciousness which is chronically drowned out and barely perceptible since it is dominated by the <a href="https://blog.studiobrule.com/2023/07/god-wheres-evidence.html" target="_blank">convincing persistent hallucination</a> of the ego consciousness. To describe this invisible inner soul-world, it must be brought to life with metaphor using imagery familiar to our conscious ego-selves. This is what our ancestors did when they recorded their experiences in the sacred texts of the world's religions. </div><div><br /></div><div>In the Old Testament, 1 Kings 19:11-13, the “still small voice” heard by Elijah, under the guidance of an angel – a topic for a separate essay – is that of his own soul, and it was hidden behind a lot of noisy distractions:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>19:11 And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD. And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: </div><div><br /></div><div>19:12 And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. </div><div><br /></div><div>19:13 And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave. And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah?</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>The wind, mountain, earthquake and fire serve as metaphor for the distractions of Elijah's own mind/ego consciousness. This story suggests that it takes patience and faith for the ego's dominant voice to settle down such that the “still small voice” of the soul can be heard. </div><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbp5WG7SWaDL0YbuLu4esIqawegK8lCozuoAjevIFTQGstGdtxm7BZ07ddyV8hYjOfx_XtFR43Wurh6aGNYY4byu-46qei34JHsWJS9YKJRTs7SNzbajIpsefrOJ05r1jSquhpTX0PFZolHaikW72Y1Ob2uZQzxRI32386QL_f_VoR63B_0g2rETMrbvJg/s1000/SBF-230511%20Frans_Hals_-_Portret_van_Ren%C3%A9_Descartes.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="817" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbp5WG7SWaDL0YbuLu4esIqawegK8lCozuoAjevIFTQGstGdtxm7BZ07ddyV8hYjOfx_XtFR43Wurh6aGNYY4byu-46qei34JHsWJS9YKJRTs7SNzbajIpsefrOJ05r1jSquhpTX0PFZolHaikW72Y1Ob2uZQzxRI32386QL_f_VoR63B_0g2rETMrbvJg/w163-h200/SBF-230511%20Frans_Hals_-_Portret_van_Ren%C3%A9_Descartes.png" width="163" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rene Descartes</td></tr></tbody></table>Once in the right psychic state, Elijah receives instructions from the LORD (previously identified by Moses as “I AM”) that his ego consciousness had not considered. Like all of us, Elijah was hypnotized and distracted by the hallucination of conventional consciousness such that he could not see what was right in front of him until he was ready to hear the “small still voice,” which he interprets as coming from an otherworldly source, a source outside of himself. This story illustrates that the persistent hallucination of consciousness is so convincing that even when we do perceive the soul it may be experienced as external. Thus we externalize our own being because it seems foreign to the persistent hallucination that is familiar to our ego. </div><br /><div>Rene Descartes struggled with the concept of self and knowledge and concluded that the only thing we can say with confidence is “<a href="https://csli-cec.stanford.edu/assets/flyers/SNS.pdf" target="_blank">I am</a>, <a href="https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2018/11/26/descartes-i-think-therefore-i-am/" target="_blank">I exist</a>,” which I discussed in my essay, “<a href="https://blog.studiobrule.com/2023/07/god-wheres-evidence.html" target="_blank">God, Where's the Evidence</a>”. Important truths such as this are often intuited before they are intellectually verified – and in this case, Descartes was preceded by Moses thousands of years earlier, as recorded in Exodus 3:14, </div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel,</span></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I AM hath sent me unto you.” </span></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>The name of God, I AM, comes from Moses' own soul. And when Descartes used pure reason to seek the one thing of which he could be certain, he too came up with “I am.”</div><div><br /></div><div>The truth intuited by Moses and reasoned by Descartes now receives the support of scientific measurement by Budson et al. Your soul, I am, the observer/decider, is separated from your conscious ego self not in space, but in time. Specifically, your conscious ego-self lags behind your soul consciousness by a half of a second and the implications are numerous, not the least of which is that:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div><span style="font-size: medium;">To live in the persistent hallucination of ego consciousness is to live half a second behind reality. It is to live in the past. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Living in the present is soul consciousness.</span></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>Since your ego consciousness is but a memory system, the you that you must fully trust and protect is your soul, which is your little corner of I AM. Everything else that you see, think and know, though useful and necessary for your survival, is but a persistent hallucination that you project onto reality. </div><div><br /></div><div>The relationship between ego and soul might be understood something like this:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">As it formed, your ego pushed your soul into the background to become the intermediator for all interactions with the outside world. It protected you, sometimes by hiding you behind a veneer of invincibility or a flurry of misdirections, and it learned to navigate a world full of hazards, traps and demands by creating a persistent hallucination of reality. The ego and the hallucination grew together and became inseparable, so an attack on the hallucination is an attack on the ego's very existent and may even be felt as a threat to your life. </div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>Thus the ego will fight to protect the integrity of the hallucination that has served it so well, even if that means crushing the small still voice of the soul that it was born to protect. This danger is captured in Matthew 16:25 KJV, </div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: </span></div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” </span></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>Here we are encouraged to sacrifice our ego for the sake of our soul; and we are warned that should the ego win, you will lose your life – you will lose your soul.</div><div><br /></div><div>The ego can become so proud of its skill and accomplishments that it convinces itself that it is ALL of you, turning a deaf ear to the whispers of the soul, or worse. Thus, to become “whole” is to crack the hard shell of the ego such that the soul can be heard, which can be a painful process. The ego has been fortified by all of the accumulated “certainties” that form the convincing persistent hallucination that you accept as reality. Those fortifications form the veils that hide you, the soul, from you, the ego in your persistent hallucination of reality. And the ego, believing itself to be the real you, doesn't even want to acknowledge the soul because that would bring it face to face with its own ethereal nature.</div><div><br /></div><div>This dissociation of the ego-self from the soul-self in mankind is what generated the psychic impetus for the emergence of religion, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin" target="_blank">healing this wound</a> is the goal of religious praxis. However the denial of God, which is also the denial of self, aborts the healing process and stunts the growth of the individual, with dire consequences for humanity. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: large;">The Birth and Evolution of Religion</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Like the revelation of “I AM” to Moses, new ideas about God often begin with an inspired insight from someone considered to be a heretic by his orthodox contemporaries. The heretic was sometimes punished and exiled for his heresy, after which his revelations were interpreted, modified and codified by his followers, and used to create a new religion. In his book, <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300228816/a-little-history-of-religion/" target="_blank">A Little History of Religion</a>, Richard Holloway put it this way: <br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigyXDT_nKXZ7z9YM1hM7x8ruwEuN4knGTgLQnEeBEIXUmN90z-9_0KaQ66yjsp5iioRd0iTfFH7jSKMOya-sA6bt1RM3XdxhGVryuW3E97ZOhcqk3eCdIQ_ox61YQs97ZWvsBmW9ic-eABwiHfCRIaCkwGIR0m-ZOkOIRI0eN4XyyfyiMScoE5kYzij8Mg/s1564/A%20Little%20History%20of%20Religion.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1564" data-original-width="1000" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigyXDT_nKXZ7z9YM1hM7x8ruwEuN4knGTgLQnEeBEIXUmN90z-9_0KaQ66yjsp5iioRd0iTfFH7jSKMOya-sA6bt1RM3XdxhGVryuW3E97ZOhcqk3eCdIQ_ox61YQs97ZWvsBmW9ic-eABwiHfCRIaCkwGIR0m-ZOkOIRI0eN4XyyfyiMScoE5kYzij8Mg/w128-h200/A%20Little%20History%20of%20Religion.jpg" width="128" /></a></div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">“Yet most religions start as heresies. A prophet responds to an inner voice that challenges the current opinion, the way Abraham scorned the gods in his father’s shop. What usually happens next is a split in which the heretic goes off and starts a new religion or sets up a competing branch of the old one. Sometimes heretics win the argument and their ideas become the new orthodoxy. Either the closed mind stays shut and the new inspiration goes elsewhere or it opens enough to let the new insight be absorbed.”</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>Holloway elaborates further on the birth and evolution of a religion:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>“In its early years there had been an experimental feel to the religion of the Israelites. We might even describe it as freelance religion. It was driven not by professional clerics but by gifted amateurs who heard God speaking to them directly. That’s how all religions start. They begin when people with special gifts, the ones we call prophets or sages, start hearing voices and seeing visions. They tell others what they have seen and what they have heard. Those who have not seen the visions or heard the voices respond with belief to what they have been told. And religious structures begin to grow.</div><div><br /></div><div>As these structures become more elaborate, a new type of leader is needed. And the move from the amateur to the professional begins. Teachers are needed to interpret the sacred stories that have been stitched together. Priests are needed to preside at the festivals that celebrate the events recorded in the book. Temples are needed where all of this activity can be concentrated. And when this long process is complete, the world has another fully fledged religion to add to its collection. </div><div><br /></div><div>But a sense remains that something was lost along the way, which is why religions always look back to their early years with both longing and regret. Like couples who get bored living together once the passion of their early love has faded, they look back with longing to the days when it flowed effortlessly. This is why all religions spend a lot of time looking back to their early years in an attempt to rekindle that original burning love. But it’s hard going, because the voice of the divine lover has fallen silent and all they have left are his letters. </div><div><br /></div><div>Or could it be that those who have taken over the religion won’t pick up the phone when God rings because they don’t want him disturbing the system they are now running by themselves? This tension is never far from the surface of organised religion.”</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>That was a long quote, but it gives a good sense of the difference between religion – which is about God – and God, which is the reality glimpsed by those able to see past the veils of their own persistent hallucination, even if briefly. Holloway sums up the codification of Judaism as a move from a “people of the Voice” to a “people of the Book,” and argues that this is typical of all religions.</div><div> </div><div>A similar intuitive process happens in science as well. The creative leap is not achieved by adherence to current orthodoxies but comes in a flash of inspiration via a process that defies explanation, <a href="https://hbr.org/2014/11/sometimes-the-best-ideas-come-from-outside-your-industry" target="_blank">often by a non-specialist outsider</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>Heretics of science, too, are sometimes punished harshly for their conflict with orthodoxy: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis" target="_blank">Ignaz Philippe Semmelweis</a>, the early pioneer of antiseptics whose work earned him the title “saviour of mothers,” was persecuted by his peers, which contributed to his mental breakdown and death; and of course the persecution of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair" target="_blank">Galileo</a> by the Catholic Church serves as a classic example of the consequence of heresy.</div><div><br /></div><div>Other examples of revelatory inspiration in science include <a href="https://web.mit.edu/redingtn/www/netadv/SP20151130.html" target="_blank">August Kekule</a>'s dream that led to the discovery of the cyclic structure of benzene; <a href="https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/story/2019-08-13/kary-mullis-dna-nobel-prize" target="_blank">Kary Mullis</a>' claim that LSD helped him conceive of PCR, for which he won the Nobel prize; and Pierre de <a href="https://simonsingh.net/books/fermats-last-theorem/the-whole-story/" target="_blank">Fermat's last theorem</a>, which he jotted in the margins of a notebook along with the remark “proof to come later,” before dying in his sleep that very night. Fermat was a lawyer by trade. </div><div><br /></div><div>It took over 300 years before Fermat's last theorem was proven by <a href="https://theconversation.com/noise-in-the-brain-enables-us-to-make-extraordinary-leaps-of-imagination-it-could-transform-the-power-of-computers-too-192367" target="_blank">Andrew Wiles, who had this to say about his work</a>: </div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglB0rmbRWbZJQwMq2zdrx5v7Bd7Q7dqDLxueaVFRiYLXy-GOZzzImuHdJ9FIS1YSzMW7_Xpq_iZea4qlDPSii4_iNDlQdWwig4C2j40L_x6E12d_rZZ3RFskP4bgMsbhyphenhyphen0JKXLD1S_F5zdma6kUDPcEMCzqOuvUBDBlt9FuRVFlnz7FN97zfMvcCUiZiuf/s2039/Andrew%20Wiles%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2039" data-original-width="1993" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglB0rmbRWbZJQwMq2zdrx5v7Bd7Q7dqDLxueaVFRiYLXy-GOZzzImuHdJ9FIS1YSzMW7_Xpq_iZea4qlDPSii4_iNDlQdWwig4C2j40L_x6E12d_rZZ3RFskP4bgMsbhyphenhyphen0JKXLD1S_F5zdma6kUDPcEMCzqOuvUBDBlt9FuRVFlnz7FN97zfMvcCUiZiuf/w196-h200/Andrew%20Wiles%20b.png" width="196" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andrew Wiles</td></tr></tbody></table>“When you reach a real impasse, then routine mathematical thinking is of no use to you. Leading up to that kind of new idea, there has to be a long period of tremendous focus on the problem without any distraction. You have to really think about nothing but that problem – just concentrate on it. And then you stop. [At this point] there seems to be a period of relaxation during which the subconscious appears to take over – and it’s during this time that some new insight comes.”</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps both Fermat's and Wiles' insight were made possible by an ability to set aside the persistent hallucination that acts as a veil over reality. This would be the same intuitive process that allowed Moses to hear the still small voice of his soul reveal the name of God to be, I AM.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="white-space: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The Zen of I Am</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div>“I am” is nothing, or nothingness. Your part of that “nothing” is your soul, and it is one with God – I AM. It is a “nothing” that is not nothing, which is a concept familiar to scientists in the form of the incomprehensible energy of the <a href="https://profmattstrassler.com/articles-and-posts/particle-physics-basics/quantum-fluctuations-and-their-energy/" target="_blank">quantum fluctuations of “empty” space</a> – itself a “nothingness” that pervades all of the universe. </div><div><br /></div><div>Psalm 46 includes this well-known, succinct poetic phrase that points to the heart of the soul: </div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“Be still, and know that I am God” </span></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>“Be still” can be understood to mean stop, drop everything, and rest in nothingness. Drop every veil, every belief, every desire and every attachment, and know that I AM. Put aside the persistent hallucination behind which lies reality, and you will see that I AM. Be still in the nothingness that is everything.</div><div><br /></div><div>But the persistent hallucination is so powerful and convincing that being still in this manner, or letting go of ego consciousness, can feel like dying. So the instinct to survive kicks-in, which activates the ego and silences the soul. </div><div><br /></div><div>This helps explain why many cultures have created sacred rituals – which may include long periods of fasting, solitude, rhythmic drumming, dance, or painful experiences – the purpose of which is to <a href="https://www.cuyamungueinstitute.com/articles-and-news/the-role-of-altered-states-of-consciousness-in-native-american-healing/" target="_blank">induce a trance-like state</a>. The stressful nature of the ritual is necessary in order to weaken the stranglehold that the ego has on the psyche such that soul consciousness can break through.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the following example, Richard Holloway describes the biblical story of the burning bush (thorn bush) where Moses hears the unconscious voice of his soul – the voice of God. Notice that Moses' life is at immanent risk, which loosens the grip of his persistent hallucination, creating a “gap” through which his soul can break into his ego consciousness:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">“Realising he was discovered and that word would soon reach the palace and put him in danger, Moses fled into the desert where he was given shelter by a family of shepherds. This is where we first encountered him, kneeling before a thorn-bush, listening to a voice that spoke words to him he didn’t want to hear and calling him to a dangerous duty he did not want to undertake. It was the same voice that had commanded Abraham to risk his life by denouncing the gods worshipped by the Mesopotamians. It was the same voice that had ordered Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice. And it was the same voice that had commanded Jacob to change his name to Israel or ‘God rules’.”</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>Holloway then points out that the Jews were “suspicious of those who thought they could contain God in a building of words [... and] they developed a tradition of disagreement with any attempt to define God in human terms.” This is very perceptive and is related to the second commandment which forbids idolatry because even words, ideas and books can be worshipped as idols. The Jewish commitment to this is beautifully illustrated in the following story in Holloway's book:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>“According to legend, when the Roman general Pompey conquered Jerusalem in 63 BCE he decided to search for the god of the Jews in their temple. The temple was built as a series of courts of increasing sacredness. Pompey strode through them until he came to the sanctuary called the Holy of Holies. This was the most sacred part of the temple into which only the High Priest was permitted to enter. Reverently, Pompey stepped into the Holy of Holies, expecting to gaze on Israel’s god. It was empty. Nothing there! </div><div><br /></div><div>Because the Jews knew that nothing or no thing could represent the voice that had haunted them for centuries. The Second Commandment had gone deeply into their souls. They had erected this magnificent temple with its chiselled stones and its sequence of beautiful courts. They had loved it and would mourn its loss throughout their history. Yet at its heart was nothing! Pompey turned away, baffled by the riddle of a religion whose symbol for its god was an empty room.” </div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>This may be the most important religious insight in history. That the Ark of the Covenant disappeared when the temple was rebuilt only strengthens the symbolic power of the Holy of Holies, in my opinion, because the Ark too may have become an idol.</div><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjATEjEUth0Jq2uFsK1twy17B05KnkKun0UyBHSqwSjNl-HLMcgbcEJabGN2Ubpqs69Nr4wTykn7OdziQvzgO1n1E7RYbGTAlJ75GgoIn2fn3K9los4NuyTGblN6xTSGaYVLn7DYPomtz-TrjlxHIc1K5mrZokkaOscJO8yPCtgrCbMgsxcbYsv-c5s26St/s2400/Holy%20of%20Holies.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2400" data-original-width="1600" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjATEjEUth0Jq2uFsK1twy17B05KnkKun0UyBHSqwSjNl-HLMcgbcEJabGN2Ubpqs69Nr4wTykn7OdziQvzgO1n1E7RYbGTAlJ75GgoIn2fn3K9los4NuyTGblN6xTSGaYVLn7DYPomtz-TrjlxHIc1K5mrZokkaOscJO8yPCtgrCbMgsxcbYsv-c5s26St/w133-h200/Holy%20of%20Holies.png" width="133" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Holy of Holies</td></tr></tbody></table>For the Jews, the Holy of Holies was where heaven and earth meet – the axis-mundi. It not only symbolized that God could not be defined, but that at the center of reality is the nothing that is not nothing. All pretensions and adornments stand at the periphery. The idols, imagery, artifacts, preoccupations and distractions of the outside world that fill the senses are excluded from the Holy of Holies, and you are left alone with your ego self, which is the only real barrier to your connection with God. As for Pompey, his ego was too hardened for this insight to penetrate, so he left exasperated.<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>But neither is the Holy of Holies the true temple of God. It is a man-made space that awaits the temple of God, which is your body – the living temple that houses both your ego and your soul. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHqpNaLYj-GPAUNl1mpiLgtWwtkR9eVz22r9nn71KgTe9VWSdXnw9L3pU-TnR6oMg7Y88H6JsTNSyEPLGiE5gjuCJq_5kPiO-3DOcy76YeRmVEj4dZISFUvT52VEpXSzhPiwdTS_yQjdERgkPA0QHespazAePZxZpwwRfB5crXYkFdkqRAD9VH_9fQeiNX/s864/Christ%2071Smymng4QL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="864" data-original-width="457" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHqpNaLYj-GPAUNl1mpiLgtWwtkR9eVz22r9nn71KgTe9VWSdXnw9L3pU-TnR6oMg7Y88H6JsTNSyEPLGiE5gjuCJq_5kPiO-3DOcy76YeRmVEj4dZISFUvT52VEpXSzhPiwdTS_yQjdERgkPA0QHespazAePZxZpwwRfB5crXYkFdkqRAD9VH_9fQeiNX/w106-h200/Christ%2071Smymng4QL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_%20b.png" width="106" /></a></div>The idea of the sacred person (the body) took root while the Jews were in extended exile and the Holy of Holies was not accessible. During this time, the concept of the axis-mundi was expanded to include the zaddiq, or holy man, and this idea later found its way into the New Testament, where Christ became the new “<a href="https://www.themathesontrust.org/papers/judaism/green-zaddiq-axis.pdf" target="_blank">sacred center</a>,” John 2:19-21 (he spake of the temple of his body).<br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Today we can say that the axis-mundi is not a place on Earth, nor is it a particular person. It is another way to refer to our connection to the nothingness that is at the center of everything and that runs through the entire universe. It is the nothing that pervades an atom, a person, and a star – it is “I AM,” from the soul of Moses and the meditations of Descartes, struggling to enter the world, struggling to be born.</div><div><br /></div><div><div style="text-align: left;">The required sacrifice, implied by the stark emptiness of the Holy of Holies, is the most difficult of all: your ego self, for there is nothing else there to sacrifice. It is this sacrifice – the submission of the ego to the soul – that completes the axis-mundi, bringing the awareness of I AM into consciousness. This is what is meant by submission to God (I AM).</div></div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimQIiwyY3Tytzj4oLmd0scLodHjnoK0k9XRqi2MWyFwlhrD6oDOJY1xodJTQEefmtLKTIjQZ9msNsbqL4nRBk2C84g5OdWBNJMSJ8C4iIOjx3HXcJxhGMsZNzbt9dpegVKDrFjK3untvx5lGVxmHx2aa25YFSycsfj9z6M-Wnxg4kypcKIDnl8TBqRtjf2/s1000/Shogun.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="651" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimQIiwyY3Tytzj4oLmd0scLodHjnoK0k9XRqi2MWyFwlhrD6oDOJY1xodJTQEefmtLKTIjQZ9msNsbqL4nRBk2C84g5OdWBNJMSJ8C4iIOjx3HXcJxhGMsZNzbt9dpegVKDrFjK3untvx5lGVxmHx2aa25YFSycsfj9z6M-Wnxg4kypcKIDnl8TBqRtjf2/w130-h200/Shogun.jpg" width="130" /></a></div>History and literature are replete with descriptions of this experience and its effect. There is even a well-written scene in the book “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52382796-sh-gun" target="_blank">Shogun</a>” by James Clavell, in which the protagonist is required to commit seppuku. He is 100% committed and intent on taking his own life in this honorable manner, but an assistant samurai prevents him at the very last second as he proceeds to plunge the blade into his abdomen. The commitment to follow through proves that the protagonist, who is shocked to discover that he will not die, is sincere about his honor. The description of the effect on the man's psyche in the aftermath reads like the death of the ego and rebirth of the soul into a world that appears entirely new and miraculous to him. The scene serves as a metaphor for the sincerity required of the ego in letting go of the persistent hallucination, even though literal death is not at stake. This is variably represented in culture as: death of the ego; living in the present; the Kingdom of God; bliss; heaven; nirvana etc. </div><div> </div><div>The intuition that a sacrifice is required in order to make the universe right is ubiquitous in human culture. The sacrifice was typically externalized because God was externalized, and God was externalized because the persistent hallucination is external to reality. The ego, being integral with the persistent hallucination, views reality, and thus God, as external. The axis-mundi had been severed from within as a consequence of the birth of consciousness. More on this in a moment.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: large;">Your ego must become your servant</span></div><div><br /></div><div>The ego must die after it has fulfilled its role of protecting the soul until it is ready to surface into the world, much like the shell of an egg must be broken in order for the bird to fly. One will then see the miracle of existence in everything. One will see the Kingdom of God on Earth, where it has always been, right in front of our eyes.</div><div><br /></div><div>The movement of humanity in this direction is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse" target="_blank">Apocalypse, a word of Greek origin meaning “uncovering,” or revelation,</a> and this is a common theme in many religions. This revelation has been underway for thousands of years and will likely continue for thousands more, because the battle for the soul is won one person at a time as each let's go of his own persistent hallucination and sees that the Kingdom of God must be found within before it can manifest on Earth. </div><div><br /></div><div>This does not mean that all hallucinations are equal or without value. Some contain ideas and theories that help us approach reality, and these have the ability to illuminate the world for the benefit of mankind. Some are wildly at odds with reality, and still others are dangerous fantasies that are used to deceive and control. But they are all hallucinations nonetheless, and though we must use them to navigate the world, we mistake them for reality at our peril.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: large;">What is reality?</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Like consciousness, we take take reality for granted. </div><div><br /></div><div>The Book of Revelation is a poetic vision of the inevitable sorts of problems that arise due to our propensity to be hypnotized by our persistent hallucinations of reality. It is an allegory that brings to life, with vivid imagery, the myriad ways that we go wrong, the consequences of which lead inexorably to a battle between good and evil, or Armageddon. Few are “saved” in this biblical story because the author contends that the majority deny God in various ways. But what does it mean to deny God?</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQhwmU4C0w5HdTDxQrjgH19aBdmkOLRX4v44icAshh07hPGIQVVfKqEv3s8RaYkqEr_BAB338T8trgF9m7RCOoNfFcMbt2lT8m9WjvDLzkB8Ta9NCoasVFjJgT3VHSJbVpqOLdKEIL0z5Wkkj3PAoaEYvf0-axKnkGhM_2_8HsHc4X4IvX_6ltMweoEjfx/s2532/the-road-less-traveled-timeless-edition-9780743243155_hr.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2532" data-original-width="1653" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQhwmU4C0w5HdTDxQrjgH19aBdmkOLRX4v44icAshh07hPGIQVVfKqEv3s8RaYkqEr_BAB338T8trgF9m7RCOoNfFcMbt2lT8m9WjvDLzkB8Ta9NCoasVFjJgT3VHSJbVpqOLdKEIL0z5Wkkj3PAoaEYvf0-axKnkGhM_2_8HsHc4X4IvX_6ltMweoEjfx/w131-h200/the-road-less-traveled-timeless-edition-9780743243155_hr.jpg" width="131" /></a></div>In his book, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/347852.The_Road_Less_Traveled" target="_blank">The Road Less Traveled</a>, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck suggests that the forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17) represents consciousness: “When we ate the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we became conscious.” The consequence of eating the forbidden fruit (evolving consciousness) was to be expelled from the garden of Eden – to be separated from God in other words. Thus consciousness itself creates the convincing illusion that we are separate from God / reality. <br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Therefore, to deny God is to deny reality. To deny reality is to place your faith in the accuracy of your hallucination and enter into an entirely self-referential mode of being in which your hallucination supersedes reality – which is the definition of psychosis. </div><div><br /></div><div>All of our ideas, theories and religions, including what we see, are but hallucinations inspired by a glimpse of God. No matter how impressive, powerful, useful or convincing they may be, they remain hallucinations that are projected onto reality. They are projected onto God.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-size: large;">Armageddon – the Battle of Hallucinations</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Chaos, war and widespread suffering are an inevitable part of the Apocalypse (unveiling) because ego dominates the world – just as the ego of conventional consciousness dominates the soul of the individual – and it will not let go of power willingly. This can be thought of as the Battle of Hallucinations, and it is fought within each person, and between people, religions, corporations and nations. </div><div><br /></div><div>No matter how unpleasant, avoiding reality is always worse than facing it. This is depicted allegorically in the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Revelation-to-John" target="_blank">Book of Revelation</a>, which describes the various ways that people deny and avoid God with horrifying consequences. A call to repent, which means “<a href="https://biblehub.com/greek/3340.htm" target="_blank">to think differently afterwards</a>,” is repeatedly issued, followed by the phrase “he that hath an ear, let him hear.” But deafness and blindness is a natural consequence of being mesmerized by the persistent hallucination, which is why most do not hear the call. </div><div><br /></div><div>This is the quintessential struggle of the human condition: the struggle to connect, and stay connected, with reality – to connect with God. Not the false god(s) that proliferate within our persistent hallucinations and that are used by those in authority to frighten and control us, but to stay connected with the I AM that is reality, the I am that is the real you – your soul. How to recognize and respond to the soul is a topic for a separate essay.</div><div><br /></div><div>The power held by the most egoistic megalomaniacs among us depends upon keeping the veils of our hallucinations firmly in place such that we do not see clearly. It is dependent upon the subtle coercion inherent in the control and manipulation of accepted “truth” because people will behave according to their beliefs. We see this manifest in the massive amount of disinformation promulgated by those who occupy the seats of power in government, media, education, religion, industry and global organizations. At all cost, the powerful will protect and promote those beliefs that lead you to behave in a way that perpetuates and expands their power. </div><div><br /></div><div>But others feel compelled to expose their lies.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRupXVwZnNtKYc0HhfM4D6MikleNhp9BfXWXFNTYzyzV7nZL1jrElp1P_Zfim2UWZtsKH8RWqoeDDy58EACOHVQCa9uyi5SagBjpC1SOBhevDz-34b4xguXhoUeg3u1ybLotZSGB4uZL4Y5dOx44QIAivdLLsNnuqEoOdqQK5huHq5kpn_yMrTHK_m8XA7/s1192/Snowden%2002%20c.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1078" data-original-width="1192" height="181" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRupXVwZnNtKYc0HhfM4D6MikleNhp9BfXWXFNTYzyzV7nZL1jrElp1P_Zfim2UWZtsKH8RWqoeDDy58EACOHVQCa9uyi5SagBjpC1SOBhevDz-34b4xguXhoUeg3u1ybLotZSGB4uZL4Y5dOx44QIAivdLLsNnuqEoOdqQK5huHq5kpn_yMrTHK_m8XA7/w200-h181/Snowden%2002%20c.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Edward Snowden</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Thus we are driven inexorably towards Armageddon as megalomaniac battles megalomaniac for control of the “truth,” and the adherents of every ideology do battle with every other for dominance. This will continue until everyone involved is either dead, enslaved, or awoken to the fact that the only truth that we can know with confidence is that of I AM. Although it may take eons, the wakened state of soul consciousness will prevail because, while hallucinations cannot be sustained indefinitely, the soul is reborn with every new life no matter how many are crushed – and billions more will be crushed before the ego and its hallucinations lose dominion over the world.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is the central story of Christianity. Jesus embodied the I AM intuited by Moses and repeatedly implored his followers to seek the Kingdom of God within and not be deceived by the world. And throughout history, others have appeared with a similar message: the world that you consciously see and believe is an illusion – it is an artifact of your ego consciousness – and God is the reality hidden within.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0GHATSQess56zj_8EACiEWr7qd-Bzks4NaaZ59A5rnUe4aZ5ImZVKWk0-d7mdIBJTQ_NgLpLPGxjHwX0oksmWdzSbYIejdHIZgys9RUSXapV874BqMVVLk8q__GED8i-gDtLMRR-CiXsybTxEK90Fa7JD_2TYqEztJADRQT4UOyIX-jMtM7VyV8BCm06p/s2048/SBF-221001%20Christ%20on%20cross%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1149" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0GHATSQess56zj_8EACiEWr7qd-Bzks4NaaZ59A5rnUe4aZ5ImZVKWk0-d7mdIBJTQ_NgLpLPGxjHwX0oksmWdzSbYIejdHIZgys9RUSXapV874BqMVVLk8q__GED8i-gDtLMRR-CiXsybTxEK90Fa7JD_2TYqEztJADRQT4UOyIX-jMtM7VyV8BCm06p/w113-h200/SBF-221001%20Christ%20on%20cross%20b.png" width="113" /></a></div><br /> Christ is killed for his effort because his message undermines the power available through the manipulation of the perception of reality. If the hallucination is broken so is its power deceive and the powerful cannot allow that to happen. </div><div><br /></div><div>The person who denies God denies his own self, He is a danger to mankind because once untethered from the soul and locked in his own hallucination, he can be made to do anything. Only the realization of “I Am,” which is the completion of the axis-mundi by the ego's submission to the soul, can inoculate a person against the efforts of the powerful to manipulate him through his own beliefs. </div><div><br /></div><div>In other words, only God can protect you from evil. This is the meaning of the Apocalypse.</div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-22279463695953934552023-08-28T14:12:00.002-04:002023-08-28T14:17:34.605-04:00Atheism is untenable<div>Imagine a primitive tribe in the center of a jungle. Their cosmology includes the idea that all water comes from a giant ocean full of living things on the other side of an enormous mountain, and this ocean God sends them rain in the form of clouds so that they may live. After thousands of years, they develop the necessary tools to cross over the mountain, so they send an envoy to pay homage to their god. But when the expedition returns they report that they saw no ocean. </div><div><br /></div><div>The tribe is immediately divided into two groups: the first group believes that their ocean god must be somewhere else, while the second group decides that oceans don't exist. Not just their ocean, but they insist that all concepts of “the Ocean,” are false. This is the origin of atheism.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JQ8VGOPNQUs" width="320" youtube-src-id="JQ8VGOPNQUs"></iframe></div><br /><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div>Atheists insist that there is no God and their argument usually relies upon the fact that there is no scientific proof of God. But this same standard is not applied to all ideas. The Big Bang theory for example has not been proven, it merely remains consistent with observation. </div><div><br /></div><div>Before I go further I would like to point out that some atheists claim that their disbelief in the existence of God is not the same as the belief that God doesn't exist. I'm not going to make that distinction here because it doesn't change my argument or my conclusion. I am going to defer to the Encyclopedia Britannica's description of atheism:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">“Generally atheism is a denial of God or of the gods, and if religion is defined in terms of belief in spiritual beings, then atheism is the rejection of all religious belief.”</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>Atheism “casts a wider net [than the claims made by specific religions, like Christianity] and rejects all belief in 'spiritual beings.'” </div></blockquote><div style="text-align: right;"><span><span style="white-space: pre;"><br /></span></span></div><div style="text-align: right;"><span><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>https://www.britannica.com/topic/atheism</span></div><div><br /></div><div>The term “spiritual beings” mentioned here includes concepts like angels, demons, spirit and the soul. </div><div><br /></div><div>Furthermore, it seems to me that self-described “soft” atheists may be better characterized as agnostics, or they may be guilty of “moving the goal posts” – an accusation they frequently make of theists – when they claim that their disbelief in the existence of God is substantially different from the belief that God doesn't exist. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>The scientific method (science), pioneered by Sir Francis Bacon in 1620, was deliberately designed to exclude questions of meaning from consideration in favor of physical descriptions of the material world. That is to say that science excludes from view any idea that will not submit to experimental proof. It does not follow that those ideas must be false, and yet that is the reasoning that atheists use to dismiss all conceptions of God. The question an atheist immediately asks is almost always “where is your proof,” and they mean <a href="http://blog.studiobrule.com/2023/07/god-wheres-evidence.html" target="_blank">where is your scientific proof</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>Atheists will happily discuss aliens, uploading your consciousness to a computer, the Big Bang theory, theories of multiple universes, telepathy and many other ideas for which there is no proof. And although scientists quite reasonably turn a blind eye to questions that fall outside of the scope of science, atheists go much further: they deny even the validity of contemplating those ideas – but only when those ideas pertain to God. They have thus made a god of Science by elevating it to the position of supreme arbiter of which ideas may legitimately be entertained, and then singling out religion as a unique category to be sneered at as if it were a competing god that must be defeated. This may be an example of “Scientism.” </div><div><br /></div><div>Therefor the very existence of atheism is implicitly dependent upon the logical fallacy of special pleading: atheists plead that ideas about god are different from other ideas that will not submit to the scientific method and thus all such ideas are false. This alone may be sufficient to conclude that atheism is untenable, but there's much more.</div><div><br /></div><div>The tragedy of atheism is that by making a god of science they minimize, or even exclude from consideration, the most important questions that an individual should contemplate: questions of meaning, especially questions of meaning with a capital "M," like the meaning of your life and what our understanding of the universe means to humanity. Refusal to consider the meaning of your life is characteristic of nihilism. That atheism is nihilistic is not in itself enough to dismiss it as untenable, it is merely a consequence of the atheistic world view. </div><div><br /></div><div>The following claim that I posted on social media triggered a visceral reaction:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>“Atheism is untenable. </div></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>To determine that God doesn't exist one would have to examine and defeat every possible conception of God, which is impossible.”</div></blockquote></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>I certainly did not believe that my off-the-cuff dismissal of atheism would be the last word on the matter but the passionate nature of the responses I received from atheists highlights the fact that the belief that god does not exist is not a dispassionate rational conclusion. It is the <i>central </i>defining “fact” in their story, and an attack on someone's story is almost always felt as a personal attack precisely because story is at the heart of humanity.</div><div><br /></div><div>Human beings are driven by story, which is often referred to as “cosmology” when that story is about the universe itself. A couple of quotes from a lecture published on the University of Oregon's website explains this nicely:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">“Cosmology is as old as humankind. Once primitive social groups developed language, it was a short step to making their first attempts to understand the world around them.”</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>and</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;">“Modern cosmology is on the borderland between science and philosophy, close to philosophy because it asks fundamental questions about the Universe, close to science since it looks for answers in the form of empirical understanding by observation and rational explanation. Thus, theories about cosmology operate with a tension between a philosophical urge for simplicity and a wish to include all the Universe's features versus the total complexity of it all.”</div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;">http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec01.html#:~:text=Cosmology</div><div><br /></div><div>Cosmology is thus the story that we create to understand the universe and our place in it and professor emeritus Helge Kragh from the University of Copenhagen sums up our present situation, which I will expand upon in a future essay:</div><div><br /></div><div>“Through most of human history, cosmology and religion have been closely intertwined, and such was still the case during the scientific revolution. More recent developments in physics and astronomy, however, resulted in cosmological views that challenged the belief in a divinely created world. The uneasy relationship between religion and scientific cosmology never ceased, and in the twentieth century religious issues even played a role in debates between rival cosmological theories.” </div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Why is story, or cosmology, so important and what does that mean for atheism?</span></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>Tolstoy, whom many of today's writers consider to be the greatest storyteller of all time, had this to say in relation to meaning, faith and god:</div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div>“… faith is a knowledge of the meaning of human life in consequence of which man does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something. If he did not believe that one must live for something, he would not live. If he does not see and recognize the illusory nature of the finite, he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, he must believe in the infinite. Without faith he cannot live…”</div><div><br /></div><div>“For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.” </div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div style="text-align: right;">https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/06/03/tolstoy-confession/</div><div style="text-align: right;">https://www.theguardian.com/global/2010/jan/06/leo-tolstoy-greatest-writer</div><div><br /></div><div>Here Tolstoy is saying that we must connect our particular existence with the infinite – meaning God or the universe itself, and I will expand on this shortly – or we must make ourselves blind to God. In other words, we must discern and articulate the story of the universe in such a way that we may relate our finite existence to the infinity of the universe. That is to say, we must have a functional cosmology in order to live and failing to do so is nihilistic. </div><div><br /></div><div>But, as pointed out previously, science cannot help us with questions of meaning at all, and Nobel physicist Steven Weinberg expressed the inexorable march of Scientism towards nihilism in his book “The First Three Minutes” like this: </div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div><span style="font-size: medium;">“The more the universe seems comprehensible, </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">the more it also seems pointless.” </span></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>This sentiment is dependent upon the assumption that any idea that will not submit to the scientific method, and hence fit Weinberg's definition of “comprehensible,” is false, or at least not worthy of consideration. Again there's an implicit special pleading to exclude meaningful stories and ideas about God while allowing unproven ideas which lie within the scope of science.</div><div><br /></div><div>The error of this assumption is made clear in the example of a hypothetical murder. A scientist might observe a bullet hole in a murder victim, note that the bullet penetrated a major artery, and conclude that the victim died of loss of blood. But those facts do not in any way explain why the person was murdered, which is the most important part of the incident.</div><div><br /></div><div>What matters most in the event of a murder is the story behind it, and the meaning of the event is entirely dependent upon the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim: <i>the meaning lies in the space, or interface</i>, between perpetrator and victim. </div><div><br /></div><div>Whether the victim had threatened the perpetrator's children or was being robbed by the perpetrator changes everything – same observations at the scene, same conclusion for cause of death, but entirely different meaning. In the first case the perpetrator is defending his children which is a socially acceptable act, whereas in the second case the perpetrator is robbing the victim which is not acceptable.</div><div><br /></div><div>This example merely illustrates that the scientific approach to discerning the truth about reality is incomplete and that the results of science must be further interpreted in order to be meaningful to humanity. </div><div><br /></div><div>Take the example of a cell phone, which is only possible by “interpreting” abstract scientific results to make a physical object. Furthermore, it exists only because of the human desire to communicate with one another. And what do we communicate? Stories. Science itself has little or nothing to say about how its results are used.</div><div><br /></div><div>In denying all concepts of god, the atheist, like the scientist in the example of murder, denies the importance of interpreting the meaning behind the observed facts. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Scientists are very comfortable with ideas that seem entirely impossible in normal life. In fact much of physics hinges upon the use of near-mystical entities. Virtual particles are real when their effects are observable, but not real when they aren't useful in calculations. Even terms that we take for granted, like “particle,” are not so easily nailed down: </div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">A detailed article in Quanta magazine titled “What is a particle?” summarized the scientific understanding of fundamental particles to conclude that “we don’t know.” </span></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>Looked at another way, the search for the now not-so-indivisible “atomos” proposed by Democritus more than 2,400 years ago ultimately led to the discovery of quarks, which are thought of as point-like entities with zero size according to quantum chromodynamics (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark). In other words our search for the fundamental building blocks of the universe, the so-called indivisible atomos, has revealed that they are mysterious entities with no size. It's almost as if they don't exist, and yet they do. </div><div><br /></div><div>That's Mystical stuff. </div><div><br /></div><div>Even more so for virtual particles which only exist while their effect on “real” particles is measurable, and all of this is before we contemplate the nature of “energy” and “forces,” the existence of which is no less mysterious simply because they can be described by a mathematical equation. Suffice it to say that atheists are more than willing to accept mystical ideas, but only when they fall within the purview of their own god, Science.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's important to point out here that science does not explain the universe. It models the universe and expresses that model in the form of theories and equations. Only stories explain things, which is their role in human affairs. In fact the entire edifice of science can be understood as a sophisticated form of map or model making. </div><div><br /></div><div>In the broadest sense, a map is something that describes a territory. It can be used to orient oneself in the world, make predictions such as “if I drive west for two kilometers and turn right I will find a coffee shop,” perform calculations such as the distance from New York to Paris and much more. And that is exactly what scientific theories do for us – they are maps that we project onto the universe. </div><div><br /></div><div>But maps and theories can never do anything more than describe reality. The map won't tell us whether we will want or like coffee, and though it may help us get to Paris we have to put the map away in order to explore and understand the reality of Paris and a lover who happens to live there.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is the denial of this shortcoming of science that enables the dismissal of ideas that fall out of reach of its power. Scientism insists that the results of science represent the sum total of what can be known. But, as in the example of a murder above, it may only be the beginning of the story.</div><div><br /></div><div>Scientists have even searched for the human soul in the past by measuring the weight of a body before and after death. They found no change and concluded that there was no evidence of a soul. Fair enough. But if, in thought experiment, we were to take apart a human being organ by organ, cell by cell, searching for the soul we would still not find it. And this is the sort of argument used by atheists to claim that the soul, being a religious term associated with ideas about God, is not real, though they are comfortable with equally vague and poorly understood terms like consciousness, virtual particle, and the idea that quarks have zero size. Again, atheists apply different standards when dealing with idea's within science.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Humanity can be described thus:</span></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>At the center of a human being there exists another virtual particle that we can call its story. And we know that it exists by virtue of its effect on the “real” particles with which it interacts – and this is the same standard applied within science for the existence of virtual particles. </div><div><br /></div><div>There also exists another particle – a particle of meaning which is made clear by those stories – and though this particle has zero size it is every bit as real as a quark which also has zero size, but its existence is not detectable by the methods of science. And we might call that particle a “soul.” </div><div><br /></div><div>The life of a human being is so short, on a universal scale, that it might well be thought of as a virtual particle that separates briefly from a larger object before it returns to its place of birth. This particle, which we have named the “soul,” carries the meaning of the universe while it lives and disappears back into the universal soul from whence it came after its purpose has been fulfilled – like a drop of water finds its way back to the ocean after falling to earth as rain and fulfilling its role in making all of life possible. </div><div><br /></div><div>Let me relate this idea to Tolstoy's insight: the soul of a person, like a drop of water, separates from the universal soul and connects “the finite with the infinite” by carrying the meaning of a person's life within the larger story of the universe, thus making his life possible.</div><div><br /></div><div>To wrap this up with respect to atheism, first we have the circular reasoning that concepts of god must meet the standards of proof defined by the scientific method which was deliberately designed to exclude questions about God, or meaning. </div><div><br /></div><div>Next, by denying the existence of all gods, atheists presume to have considered and disproven all concepts of God, which is an impossible task.</div><div><br /></div><div>Finally atheism relies upon the logical fallacy of special pleading when it happily considers unproven theories, mystical ideas, undefined particles and even multiverses when they fall within the purview of science, but then categorically rejects all concepts of god by implying that these ideas are “differently” unproven in some unspecified way.</div><div><br /></div><div>To further drive home my point in this essay, I have demonstrated that we can propose descriptions of soul and spirit – which are distinctly religious ideas – that meet the same criteria for existence as some scientifically recognized particles, like quarks and virtual particles. A soul may have zero size, like a quark, but its existence as the carrier of meaning is evidenced by its effect on the world around it. </div><div><br /></div><div>And, though the story carried by the spirit may disappear as quickly as it arose, it is as real as any virtual particle – also as evidenced by its impact on the world around it. </div><div><br /></div><div>In fact the “noosphere,” which is described as the planetary "sphere of reason" and popularized by philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, has even been referred to as a “sphere of the spirit.” </div><div><br /></div><div>So, not only is atheism untenable but it is also inherently nihilistic, as suggested by Tolstoy and made clear by Weinberg, and as such it is possibly the worst of all faiths.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> Steve Brulé</div><div><br /></div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-9905055713787900692023-07-20T16:05:00.009-04:002023-07-24T15:17:00.369-04:00God: Where's the Evidence?<div><span>One of the first questions that atheists ask of someone who believes in God is “where's the evidence?” What is meant by “God” is rarely clear and the term “Sky Daddy” has recently emerged as a way to dismiss those who think deeply about God as childish. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Normally we would clearly define what we mean before looking for evidence of its existence but, despite the many and varied ways to think of God, the question “where's the evidence?” comes up often enough that I want to deal with it in some detail here. To do so we will have to briefly discuss the complex nature of evidence in relation to a qualitative question like “does God exist?” Along the way I will offer some thoughts on how to think about God and why it's important to do so.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/o4NvIRokdsY" width="320" youtube-src-id="o4NvIRokdsY"></iframe></div></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div>For many atheists, the unstated assumption is that scientific theories have cornered the market on the truth to such a degree that nothing outside of the scope of science can be true. In a sense the atheist's overarching theory is that “science can explain everything,” and some call this “Scientism.”</div></div><div><div class="separator"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEickcnc3D_qBg3v48W6A6Y39WPlvsGj6q4mLgN_P3Doe6r1l-AGeN8qNg2DfzTLBSOKeXRLplTh9yjckTWbZsAUw4AMDrqrAbaQkdQtmeKc-NcN-UtaVC5zKs6amEf1-4xhYOlv0vvT0hjXcuvqKeWuTJIiOgefA6MFo9mT7JvGn-i_iWJx6UALCtKczF3O/s974/SBF-230511%20Invisible%20Manb.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="974" data-original-width="476" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEickcnc3D_qBg3v48W6A6Y39WPlvsGj6q4mLgN_P3Doe6r1l-AGeN8qNg2DfzTLBSOKeXRLplTh9yjckTWbZsAUw4AMDrqrAbaQkdQtmeKc-NcN-UtaVC5zKs6amEf1-4xhYOlv0vvT0hjXcuvqKeWuTJIiOgefA6MFo9mT7JvGn-i_iWJx6UALCtKczF3O/w98-h200/SBF-230511%20Invisible%20Manb.png" width="98" /></a></div><span style="text-align: left;">But </span><a href="https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/genesismission/educate/scimodule/Cosmogony/CosmogonyPDF/AppendixB.pdf" style="text-align: left;" target="_blank">a scientific theory is only a model built upon assumptions</a><span style="text-align: left;"> that is projected onto the universe and subsequently tested to see how well it fits, which I discussed in the video essay “</span><a href="https://youtu.be/JQ8VGOPNQUs" style="text-align: left;" target="_blank">Atheism is Untenable</a><span style="text-align: left;">.” Therefore our theories are like clothes on an invisible man: they reveal his form and movement but tell us nothing about him. The following intro to the article “<a href="https://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/scientific-experiments/10-scientific-laws-theories.htm" target="_blank">10 Scientific Laws and Theories You Really Should Know</a>” gives us a sense of their limitations:</span></div></div><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span>“Scientists have many tools available to them when attempting to describe how nature and the universe at large work. Often they reach for laws and theories first. What's the difference? A scientific law can often be reduced to a mathematical statement, such as E = mc²; it's a specific statement based on empirical data, and its truth is generally confined to a certain set of conditions.”</span></div></blockquote><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span>“A scientific theory often seeks to synthesize a body of evidence or observations of particular phenomena. [It represents] something fundamental about how nature works.”</span></div></blockquote><div><span><br /></span></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmtYl5enJ0yWezvmvd9kotghsYN_0_kWQrbM2OFL3Iyeo_ZLWqsRjUazdLeCub8WVHMAq4ZgxTXoSRkJDXrBNhS4tBIxDBVvWEwO_U1O_-9rFXg1WRwFxVvNQPmf8QhPjEldOGu4adowb7OPIN6CqExXRW3_7PG-gIOg0FE9Ebx81J2ghJKoNR59O_Q6HM/s1600/SBF-230511%20Gleiser%20b.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1257" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmtYl5enJ0yWezvmvd9kotghsYN_0_kWQrbM2OFL3Iyeo_ZLWqsRjUazdLeCub8WVHMAq4ZgxTXoSRkJDXrBNhS4tBIxDBVvWEwO_U1O_-9rFXg1WRwFxVvNQPmf8QhPjEldOGu4adowb7OPIN6CqExXRW3_7PG-gIOg0FE9Ebx81J2ghJKoNR59O_Q6HM/w157-h200/SBF-230511%20Gleiser%20b.png" width="157" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Marcelo Gleiser</td></tr></tbody></table><span>The authors make clear that a scientific theory describes how some part of the universe works more broadly than a law but still limited to its area of application. For example Evolution accounts for how new species emerge within the biosphere through natural selection and Quantum Theory describes the behavior of matter at extremely small scales. Even the pursuit of the scientific <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything" target="_blank">theory of everything (TOE)</a>, which aims to unify the forces of the universe into one, thus bridging the gap between general relativity and quantum mechanics, only strives to explain how the universe works, like a mechanic's car manual. It makes no claim about how it came to be or its meaning or purpose, which in the case of a car might include: who is allowed to drive it, where will you go with it, what color you prefer and what does it mean to you, all of which are deeply personal. Furthermore, professor Marcelo Gleiser from Dartmouth College points out that <a href="https://bigthink.com/13-8/theory-of-everything-2/" target="_blank">“the impulse to unify goes back to the notion of unity found in monotheistic faiths”</a> and “the philosophy behind it [the TOE] is faulty.” Like other philosophers, he points out that we do not see nature directly using science: “what we observe is not Nature itself but Nature exposed to our methods of questioning,” which is another way of saying that we clothe the universe in theories that help us make sense of it.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>The atheist dismisses all phenomena as being the mundane result of physical laws thus reducing all of existence to the status of a machine, and this has become uncritically accepted by many in Western culture. However one could easily argue that the laws of physics were created by God, as Einstein suggested, which would mean that everything in the universe happens as the result of an a priori act of God.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span>“<a href="https://www.bethinking.org/god/did-einstein-believe-in-god" target="_blank">My God created laws… His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking but by immutable laws.</a>” – Albert Einstein</span></div></blockquote><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Einstein's views on God were complex, as we might expect from a man of such intelligence and, when pressed, Einstein said,</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span>“<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_and_philosophical_views_of_Albert_Einstein" target="_blank">I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist</a>... I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings. Einstein believed the problem of God was the "most difficult in the world"—a question that could not be answered "simply with yes or no". He conceded that "the problem involved is too vast for our limited minds.” </span></div></blockquote><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Clearly Einstein, a scientific giant, would not refer to God as “Sky Daddy.”</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Although Einstein was uneasy with the term, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/" target="_blank">Baruch Spinoza, to whom he defers, is considered by many to have been a Pantheist, perhaps with some reservations</a> – once again to be expected of an intelligent, deep-thinking man who attempts to articulate a definition of God. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Einstein was not so bold as to claim that he could provide a definition of God and his rejection of pantheism suggests that he was not completely satisfied with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza" target="_blank">Spinoza's definition either, which is summarized as</a>: </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span>“A substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence."</span></div></blockquote><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>And further,</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span>God is "the sum of the natural and physical laws of the universe and certainly not an individual entity or creator.”</span></div></blockquote><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Although I am partial to pantheism, more on that later, Spinoza's definition and “proof” of God comes off as a bit of sophisticated hand-waving to me, but maybe I'm missing something. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Evidence</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Let's put aside the fact that what we mean by God is not clear and get back to the atheist's demand for evidence of God.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Professors Steven Miller and Marcel Fredericks of Loyola University were concerned about the increasingly popular use of qualitative research in science and published an article on the subtle complexities of <a href="https://sites.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/2_1/html/miller.html" target="_blank">the nature of evidence in 2003</a>. It's not an easy read and it makes reference to even more difficult philosophical works, but a few excerpts help make clear the atheist's misunderstanding of the term “evidence,” and in a moment I will explain how this demand for evidence of God reveals the nihilistic nature of atheism. Miller and Fredericks wrote:</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span>“When do findings [...] become evidence? Our findings must stand in some relationship to what we claim to be evidence if they are to serve (in some sense) as "truth markers" (Kirkham, 1997).”</span></div></blockquote><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span>“This distinction is one that is not made clear enough in interpretive inquiry. The general idea is to show how the data (no matter how generated) stand in relationship to the question, topic, or theme of interest. In other words, in what sense do we know that the data are (or are not) evidence? Data become evidence; they are not (alone) evidence; and this is an epistemological concern.”</span></div></blockquote><div><span> </span></div><div><span>“What is evidence?” the authors ask. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span><i>This is a seemingly simple question, but one surprisingly not asked in many research contexts. Part of the reason is that evidence is difficult to define. For example, Mautner (1999, p. 184), in a dictionary of philosophy, says evidence is "that which provides a ground for a belief or a theory." Audi (1999, p. 293), in another philosophical dictionary, says evidence is "information bearing on the truth or falsity of a proposition."</i></span></div></blockquote><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>They then provide a lengthy discussion about the complex nature of evidence as it pertains to qualitative research, which is what we are practicing when we hypothesize that “God exists.” The authors conclude:</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span>“How can we even proceed if there is no explicit notion of how qualitative data become evidence? Our belief is that we cannot. However, recognizing what is involved and being willing to discuss it in the context of actual research studies constitutes an important first step in showing the credibility of the qualitative research paradigm.”</span></div></blockquote><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>The authors conclude that it is impossible to qualify data as evidence even in the pursuit of simple qualitative scientific research, and our task is anything but simple. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>So not only is there no universally recognized and accessible definition of God, but no one can even explain how observational data, which is the universe and everything in it, can become evidence pertaining to the qualitative question “does God exist?.”</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Existence</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLCwWfjgY52JnqSzciLHOKMZ5ipoVCTCDy4PTPIwlAkU5aN4LfxNyipIwAx73IunlGUtp13bp71jYKJ__fAeuoQqX8CblazGY4ABDA6tRSZ4hg9jihbMpzyRKEuWd_hBolnCuqK-JrXQKxUGQ3VQU4omC3NwAhYYHBFKhsTbCrEZMBrvRJfCicPEKhUqIv/s7360/SBF-230511%20Michael_Brooks_credit_Andrew_Perris%20b.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="7360" data-original-width="4912" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLCwWfjgY52JnqSzciLHOKMZ5ipoVCTCDy4PTPIwlAkU5aN4LfxNyipIwAx73IunlGUtp13bp71jYKJ__fAeuoQqX8CblazGY4ABDA6tRSZ4hg9jihbMpzyRKEuWd_hBolnCuqK-JrXQKxUGQ3VQU4omC3NwAhYYHBFKhsTbCrEZMBrvRJfCicPEKhUqIv/w134-h200/SBF-230511%20Michael_Brooks_credit_Andrew_Perris%20b.png" width="134" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Michael Brooks</td></tr></tbody></table>It seems clear that we will never prove nor disprove the existence of God with evidence. In fact philosophers have concluded that a person cannot even prove his own existence, as Quantum Physicist Michael Brooks from the University of Sussex points out in his essay “<a href="https://csli-cec.stanford.edu/assets/flyers/SNS.pdf" target="_blank">How do I know I exist?</a>” published in New Scientist magazine in 2001:</div><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div><span>“In a nutshell, you don’t.”</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>“Philosopher René Descartes hit the nail on the head when he wrote “cogito ergo sum”. The only evidence you have that you exist as a self-aware being is your conscious experience of thinking about your existence. Beyond that you’re on your own. You cannot access anyone else’s conscious thoughts, so you will never know if they are self-aware.”</span></div></blockquote><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>We'll come back to Rene Descartes' critical insight in a moment.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Since an objective treatment of a thesis requires evidence and evidence is not possible, the only accessible knowledge of God must be <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism" target="_blank">empirical</a>. Since all empirical knowledge comes from experience, which is dependent upon individual perception and subject to interpretation, the resulting mental models must be unique to the individual even though they may be broadly similar among like-minded members of a community. This should not shock anyone because even though we can accept that an objective world exists, our conscious experience of that reality is subjective -- it is personal.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>The intimate nature of a person's conscious internal representation of God makes it much more difficult to abandon than a disproven scientific theory, but the failure of any particular representation to provide a full and convincing account of God, be it Christian, Islamic or Hindu, does not nullify God anymore than the failure of the geocentric model nullified the universe.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Consciousness and Hallucination</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Let's take a moment to consider the nature of consciousness since that is where the knowledge and representations of God must reside if they are to exist at all. </span></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw876I2DXDby9Use7KdFNJUmPIgbOW5EugyHvUfAwDoDpsfA4OCBHTAB5jAbdojn1zNIXKVBbdZ3Cs8wnX9iAc5zjt_CS_K9Njkm7OCG3WZVgl_w11ic-Syk1mkXDo_KE2V118CiR7goyA7wM64OPWM7jhvAoSTAtfgVyKwJYCNGX6C8Pf4OzihkcjZI_Y/s1014/SBF-230511%20Anil%20Seth%20b.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="940" data-original-width="1014" height="186" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw876I2DXDby9Use7KdFNJUmPIgbOW5EugyHvUfAwDoDpsfA4OCBHTAB5jAbdojn1zNIXKVBbdZ3Cs8wnX9iAc5zjt_CS_K9Njkm7OCG3WZVgl_w11ic-Syk1mkXDo_KE2V118CiR7goyA7wM64OPWM7jhvAoSTAtfgVyKwJYCNGX6C8Pf4OzihkcjZI_Y/w200-h186/SBF-230511%20Anil%20Seth%20b.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Anil Seth</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></div><div>We have all experienced the temporary hallucination of a dream that dissolves upon awakening, but our woken conscious state is not entirely different from the dream state and can be understood as a “persistent hallucination,” albeit a very convincing one. In fact neuroscientist Anil Seth suggests that reality consists of hallucinations that we all agree upon, concluding that “<a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xjbn3/consciousness-is-just-a-bunch-of-hallucinations-we-collectively-agree-on" target="_blank">we don’t just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it</a>.” </div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>This idea gains support from <a href="https://www.bumc.bu.edu/busm/2022/10/03/new-explanation-for-consciousness/" target="_blank">researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine </a>who theorize that:</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div><span>“Consciousness developed as a memory system that is used by our unconscious brain to help us flexibly and creatively imagine the future and plan accordingly.” </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>“We don’t perceive the world, make decisions, or perform actions directly. Instead, we do all these things unconsciously and then—about half a second later—consciously remember doing them.”</span></div></blockquote><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>The researchers further explain in their<a href="https://journals.lww.com/cogbehavneurol/Fulltext/2022/12000/Consciousness_as_a_Memory_System.5.aspx" target="_blank"> detailed paper published in the Journal of the Society for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology, December 2022</a>, that </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span>“Consciousness was subsequently co-opted to produce other functions that are not directly relevant to memory per se, such as problem-solving, abstract thinking, and language.”</span></div></blockquote><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>The implication is that there is a deeper “you” that perceives and decides in the moment – the unconscious part of you – and it is more fundamental than your brain's higher functions.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>If our real-time perceptions and decisions are made unconsciously and only later preserved in conscious memory, what is the nature of that unconscious self? Is it not god-like to us? And what lies even deeper than that unconscious self? </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Perhaps our ancestors intuited this and tried to capture their experiences in the form of sacred stories with God, the unconscious mover, as the main character. It is not hard to imagine them interpreting the stirring of their unconscious selves as “God moving within.” In fact, as we shall see shortly, “I am,” which is the name of God given in Exodus, emerged in just such a manner.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">I am, but what am I?</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>In our present positivist Western culture, we are all encouraged to identify most strongly with our consciously created self-image and, if recognized at all, the unconscious observer / decider within is often dismissed or denied – as is God. But if our consciousness is only a memory system which holds the conscious identity, this whole process becomes circular: the identity is created within the conscious memory system and then validates itself by its claim of consciousness, unaware that it is not the decision-maker. In fact the practice of psychotherapy exists only because our conscious selves are prone to drift away from reality and thus become disconnected from the world in which our unconscious bodies exist.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Furthermore, since the unconscious is more closely connected to the body, which is a fragment of the universe, disconnection of the conscious mind from the unconscious self means that we become disconnected from the universe, or in other words, we become disconnected from God. I will come back to the idea of the universe as the body of God in a moment.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>As convincing as your reality seems, you are not what you think you are: you have invented it, you are dreaming it. You have incorporated the mysterious machinations of your unconscious into the memory system that we call consciousness, structured it as your identity, and then you have denied its origins – you have denied God. But your waking life, as you believe it to be, is only a persistent hallucination in which your true self is all but invisible to you. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Even less perhaps is the universe what you think it is, but let's get back to René Descartes.</span></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3-YoAQYPSylX3Ei2a9K2vCDUROUbbMEZS4PWPqWJeLhH08n7NOIWjpWeq9NOJy7WbbGBsmHBXbEnv7CKFmSK7zmCf7_e88mkgvpUTFlV-FRTOmioXWMVxhyffH5E1u-_pRUi5zxkb0KSEg9dAu30G4dEByOt8ZUgapWKZ24Fe_uHzjQCMlvDIJMSSytlv/s1000/SBF-230511%20Frans_Hals_-_Portret_van_Ren%C3%A9_Descartes.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="817" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3-YoAQYPSylX3Ei2a9K2vCDUROUbbMEZS4PWPqWJeLhH08n7NOIWjpWeq9NOJy7WbbGBsmHBXbEnv7CKFmSK7zmCf7_e88mkgvpUTFlV-FRTOmioXWMVxhyffH5E1u-_pRUi5zxkb0KSEg9dAu30G4dEByOt8ZUgapWKZ24Fe_uHzjQCMlvDIJMSSytlv/w163-h200/SBF-230511%20Frans_Hals_-_Portret_van_Ren%C3%A9_Descartes.png" width="163" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rene Descartes</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span><br /></span></div><div>Although you cannot prove your own existence, as pointed out by professor Brooks, Descartes' conclusion, “<a href="https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2018/11/26/descartes-i-think-therefore-i-am/" target="_blank">I think, therefore I am</a>,” which he later modified in the <a href="https://yale.learningu.org/download/H2665_Descartes'%20Meditations.pdf" target="_blank">Meditations</a> to “I am, I exist” is helpful to our exploration of God, and his related <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/rene-descartes/" target="_blank">ontological argument for the existence of God is still discussed today</a>, attracting both praise and criticism.</div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Descartes concludes that “I exist” in conjunction with the claim “I am” in the manner of God in the Book of Exodus:</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><div><span><i>Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”</i></span></div><div><span><i><br /></i></span></div><div><span><i>God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3: 13–14)</i></span></div></blockquote><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>The name of God is presented in Exodus as “I am” and Descartes declares the same, concluding that “I exist” by reason alone. To deny one is thus to deny both for they are intimately related, as Descartes suggests, and they will never submit to evidentiary proof, as demonstrated above. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div>The “I am” of Exodus emerged from the human unconscious thousands of years before Descartes' conscious argument for its validity, and similar ideas have spontaneously emerged in other cultural traditions as well. Both the Greek and the Egyptian creation myths claim that the universe emerged from a state of nothingness which they call “Chaos,” which in a way parallels the emergence of the insight “I exist” from the “I am” of the unconscious as recorded in Exodus. From Chaos came the universe; from “I am” came “I exist.”</div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Hinduism claims that “<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zv2fgwx/revision/7" target="_blank">the universe was created by Brahma, the creator who made the universe out of himself</a>.” In this case “I am” is Brahma the creator, and “I exist” is the created universe. The universe is made from Brahma, God the creator, and every part of it is Brahma – every part of the universe is God. Existence is inseparable from God. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Hinduism is complex and its sacred texts, the Upanishads, contain an enormous amount of detail. For example it postulates that two other gods – Vishnu the preserver of the world and Shiva the destroyer, both of whom we might liken to forces of the universe – took over after the universe was created, but these details do not concern us. What is important is the similarity of the revelation that emerged from the human unconsciousness in different cultures, a revelation deemed important enough to preserve through millenia and later affirmed through reason alone by Descartes. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span><i>The universe emerged from Brahma just as </i></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span><i>“I exist” emerged</i></span><span style="text-align: left;"> </span><i>from “I am.” </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>The conscious thought and memories that you identify as self</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i> and Descartes identifies as “I exist” </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>emerged from the unconscious god “I am.” </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span><br /></span></div><div><span>God created the universe out of himself, and thus “I am” and “I exist” are inseparable.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>So given that I am, what exactly am I? And what am I if not a fragment of the universe? And if I am a fragment of the universe, which God created from himself, am I not a fragment of God? </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>This is a description of pantheism and the issue with pantheism is that it denies, or at least ignores, the existence of anything outside of creation – the transcendent God -- which one cannot definitively conclude. For now, I will trust that any aspect of God outside of our universe – the “uncreated” and/or the “uncreated creator” categories – is also outside of my concern, though I recognize that the boundary between immanent and transcendent God is far from clear and may even be arbitrary. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Evidence of God</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>To demand evidence of God is to misunderstand both evidence and God. Our endeavor to know God is a qualitative exploration of the universe that lies beyond the reach of science, and behind the theories with which we have clothed the universe – it is the effort to understand ourselves and to find our place in the universe. This is necessarily an introspective journey, with evidence only able to hint at what might or might not be. It asks us to synthesize and interpret all of our knowledge – objective and empirical; scientific and philosophical – into a cohesive, personally meaningful whole. </span></div><div><br /></div><div>However, the clothes that we have invented in the form of scientific theories reveal the form and movement of the universe so well that a great many among us have become convinced not only that there is nothing under the clothes but that only a fool would even speculate. </div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbcZ9ul5NkjG_ob0PrfIt84pEC_TpCP51tPJDvbtEG5qWWZTiJa4F0r3MSox4Q8o0p1Cnk2TuHIF1Cpo0H97FtAzHaXPb070PkLi7GHMWe2vUuoHVX42vEa-js_5mSBlTxH-dxtqGrWQtLJWC1QuJmsX0Zv-Ph5dLUggJd-zvGYs0YB3z47UjGHM_FgAJv/s946/SBF-230511%20God%20Evidence.-%20Invisible%20Man%20Clothes.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="946" data-original-width="715" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbcZ9ul5NkjG_ob0PrfIt84pEC_TpCP51tPJDvbtEG5qWWZTiJa4F0r3MSox4Q8o0p1Cnk2TuHIF1Cpo0H97FtAzHaXPb070PkLi7GHMWe2vUuoHVX42vEa-js_5mSBlTxH-dxtqGrWQtLJWC1QuJmsX0Zv-Ph5dLUggJd-zvGYs0YB3z47UjGHM_FgAJv/w151-h200/SBF-230511%20God%20Evidence.-%20Invisible%20Man%20Clothes.png" width="151" /></a></div><span>Similarly, we are now creating a plethora of identities from bits and pieces of our culture only to wear them like battle armor in an increasingly bizarre war centered on gender and ideological affiliation. This armor not only defines the relationships that we must create and maintain in order to function in a complex society but it also hides us from one another. More importantly, having been convinced that there can be nothing beneath the armor, or clothes, these “identities” hide us from our deeper selves, encouraging us to drift away from reality.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>We clothe the universe in our theories and we clothe ourselves in our identities. But both our theories and our identities only exist within the persistent hallucination of the conscious mind. They are not real. They are only representations of what is real, like a hologram.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>It is no coincidence that proof of God is as elusive as proof of your own existence because they are one and the same dilemma. You are a fragment of the universe observing the universe. The desire to know what that means is the yearning for God, and the first step on that journey is to recognize that neither God, the universe, nor your identity can be restricted by the persistent hallucination of your consciousness. Your identity must be sought below the level of the conscious self. It must be rooted in the body; it must be rooted in God. It must be discovered more than invented, and the reason that identity politics has resulted in such chaos is that we have disconnected identity from its authentic root: your unconscious self, your physical body, the body of God. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>The role of the persistent hallucination of consciousness is to serve the body – your fragment of God – to protect and nurture it, not to rule over it. But rather than adopt the humble role of servant, identity politics glorifies the egotistic effort to make our bodies conform to our fantasies.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Thus the denial of God is the nihilistic denial of the observer/decider within and the refusal to accept the task of understanding oneself – the task of becoming an integrated whole. It is a profound rejection of the deepest, most personal dimension of your own own being, and this is at the root of our present obsession with identity politics, environmentalism, feminism and the explosive transgender phenomenon, all of which seek to fill the void left by the denial of God and your relationship with him.</span></div><div><br /></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span> Steve Brulé</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: x-large;">Postscript</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj850PrmE8y5QizuBTSd2i2zKHemBCcOBJ1Xe4x6shasRVqVE7liZ1s3gBV5n8OyGSulHBUgdjMPywtfirrd5mR-FEVEOJal5vKw07-2xH70CCqt5uCj1FoMjRcs4cxSG5U_EaQoKAChrB67My10Lx-W_HNhxcZCpRXhy8eYIXiBXjWgIuKJIjY-48ES-Ut/s1421/SBF-230511%20Thomas%20Berry%2002%20c.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1421" data-original-width="1103" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj850PrmE8y5QizuBTSd2i2zKHemBCcOBJ1Xe4x6shasRVqVE7liZ1s3gBV5n8OyGSulHBUgdjMPywtfirrd5mR-FEVEOJal5vKw07-2xH70CCqt5uCj1FoMjRcs4cxSG5U_EaQoKAChrB67My10Lx-W_HNhxcZCpRXhy8eYIXiBXjWgIuKJIjY-48ES-Ut/w155-h200/SBF-230511%20Thomas%20Berry%2002%20c.png" width="155" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thomas Berry</td></tr></tbody></table>Previously I have argued that <a href="https://youtu.be/JQ8VGOPNQUs" target="_blank">atheism is untenable</a>, that <a href="https://youtu.be/ypwlbU2-jmI" target="_blank">neo-atheism is fraudulent</a> and that <a href="https://youtu.be/5UlhlwmxY1U" target="_blank">religious fundamentalism is seriously flawed</a>. But we cannot move forward without a way to understand our inner world, including the unconscious seat of perception and decision-making, and our relationship with the world around us, including our place in the universe. I agree with Thomas Berry who pointed out that our present [sacred] story is failing us and that the most important task of our age is to create a coherent modern cosmology that is consistent with our present understanding of the universe and that can provide meaning to our work and context to our lives, suffering, and death – a story of God, the universe and our place in it. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Readers might conclude that I am dismissive of the transcendent nature of God, but this is not my intention. Neither the transcendent nor the immanent God can be dismissed and the boundary between the two is far from clear -- and may even be arbitrary – but the unconscious observer / decider described above might be thought of as the bridge between the two.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>Another way to think of the universe and God that is not quite captured by pantheism, pandeism, panenthism, Hinduism or any tradition to my knowledge, is to think of the universe as God being born rather than as God's creation in its finished form. </span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><span>The idea that the universe itself is the body of God in the process of being born accommodates the theory of evolution and implies not only that the universe is inseparable from God but that it is alive and not yet finished. It implies not only that we are part of the body of God, but that we are also part of a story much larger than humanity, and that there's more to come.</span></div><div><span><br /></span></div><div><br /></div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-15402439127451331112023-06-16T09:34:00.002-04:002023-06-16T09:34:48.601-04:00Feminism’s Global Campaign to Emasculate the World - Janice Fiamengo<div>It’s there for all to see: at the heart of the United Nations and its affiliated international organizations is the determination to export radical feminism to all corners of the globe.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSDBAwnYiVbMT3lf5v4h5QbFk8LOYyzj2jBlnCdesm32-DPIR-KeiCBUKiKjGVxgzy2kEn0A12bgQX--MPT_2jyu2aRKZgd5ZeiBgX1EPbDNjEw0jScbhgfF8BHX3vqUjm3eXLumTwuGY41ys3BzuUQWfPGxZZmdruYSh_QOu7VZMXXWry-21bvuowvw/s675/FF2-037%2001%20UN.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="350" data-original-width="675" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSDBAwnYiVbMT3lf5v4h5QbFk8LOYyzj2jBlnCdesm32-DPIR-KeiCBUKiKjGVxgzy2kEn0A12bgQX--MPT_2jyu2aRKZgd5ZeiBgX1EPbDNjEw0jScbhgfF8BHX3vqUjm3eXLumTwuGY41ys3BzuUQWfPGxZZmdruYSh_QOu7VZMXXWry-21bvuowvw/w400-h208/FF2-037%2001%20UN.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Earlier in this series, I looked at how feminism first garnered international influence by affixing itself to global governance bodies, most significantly the League of Nations. From there it expanded into the European Union, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, and many others. </div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><span></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfsNUr7ct-80aNf6Hy0uS1sVe8KIyXUv4QmbByjKZk4_pAR9kE9SYWxYS0QM7Nb74ncQaBnWhYiAB0KCmDtFRav0EB0duNJkjhtyYcSHssiUBPx5OFN20pgTn2Qrwlh28eX-IXk20f-WJPcbLWsyA5VTUn4YIKq04wFSzVRZHV1GcuwBhfFbyocgNm4Q/s770/FF2-037%2002%20UN.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="402" data-original-width="770" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfsNUr7ct-80aNf6Hy0uS1sVe8KIyXUv4QmbByjKZk4_pAR9kE9SYWxYS0QM7Nb74ncQaBnWhYiAB0KCmDtFRav0EB0duNJkjhtyYcSHssiUBPx5OFN20pgTn2Qrwlh28eX-IXk20f-WJPcbLWsyA5VTUn4YIKq04wFSzVRZHV1GcuwBhfFbyocgNm4Q/w400-h209/FF2-037%2002%20UN.png" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>The great advantage of these groups is that they have power without accountability. There is no need to convince a national or local populace to vote in specific policy objectives—and little danger that officials will be voted out; policies can be imposed by fiat in the name of global economic development, justice, and women’s rights.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8bPAoxnD7E-d-oIA6562N9KjgO8u9rHdGTKmoeqTyHcgUt4j6qyo0uT-EwVToKkMmOvztcaCpsoKodGnu925rQQwoN1jkhhglmB2VXGc6hXzXIkZC5h0F7FXDqQ15LN_K6Yc5Pg77ewkobyq-1-bBLVefNs6gRAYlDK8eMBpKsvCEpRmHvfdOZTPtzg/s1234/FF2-026%20P08.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="684" data-original-width="1234" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8bPAoxnD7E-d-oIA6562N9KjgO8u9rHdGTKmoeqTyHcgUt4j6qyo0uT-EwVToKkMmOvztcaCpsoKodGnu925rQQwoN1jkhhglmB2VXGc6hXzXIkZC5h0F7FXDqQ15LN_K6Yc5Pg77ewkobyq-1-bBLVefNs6gRAYlDK8eMBpKsvCEpRmHvfdOZTPtzg/w400-h221/FF2-026%20P08.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>Thus the United Nations, founded with the goal of preventing war, now has an enormous number of offices, officials, agencies, and commissions devoted to what it calls somewhat contradictorily or perhaps tautologically “gender equality and the empowerment of women.” As Stephen Baskerville points out, “Not a single such agency exists for men (or for families that include men) despite the fact that men are the overwhelming majority of war casualties, AIDS victims, victims of occupational injuries and deaths, victims of incarceration, and more” (The New Politics of Sex, p. 249). </div><div>Why so much emphasis on women, even in an agency such as UNICEF ostensibly dedicated to helping children? As we’ll see, the agenda is, as it always is, to disenfranchise men and boys, to weaken families, and to produce increased dependence on global organizations—and thus more power centralized in the hands of those who run the UN and its many affiliates. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHHa9l-OJaktxu0GhWAaH80Yg06xWtz343xM1BkcvdZrvulBHxhQkFoPcVpfL38QHDUX3KSSn0UdgbJAhrN06Bz0Km6KlV9ZtQjxcZA0D8h7q3fuFII3shy1ZFJNSjsfcWAko41HM7Hw9_a034xHimxe3IbFM0AI8khR16IqU5G-uaFVrNiAIOHuobJQ/s1430/FF2-037%2003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="805" data-original-width="1430" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHHa9l-OJaktxu0GhWAaH80Yg06xWtz343xM1BkcvdZrvulBHxhQkFoPcVpfL38QHDUX3KSSn0UdgbJAhrN06Bz0Km6KlV9ZtQjxcZA0D8h7q3fuFII3shy1ZFJNSjsfcWAko41HM7Hw9_a034xHimxe3IbFM0AI8khR16IqU5G-uaFVrNiAIOHuobJQ/w400-h225/FF2-037%2003.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>The stated rationale of the UN is that the empowerment of women is a force of stability in the world: bringing about more robust economic development, more sustainable environmental practices, and better education for children. Such a vast contention is unprovable, and given the history of women’s empowerment in the United States, one of the most bellicose and interventionist nations on earth, the opposite contention is just as likely. In fact, the UN has fully embraced the western feminist program: pushing the goals of sexual liberation, queer and trans identities, recognition of gender as a cultural construct, and the economic disempowerment of men. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHcacZZODek98u9lD3JnsIc1oBzyoWuLie16pJ23rsx90A5zaQC19J75lxs41P_3HTT0tsHuVi-MGOW2Gk7F3mofjPaPAluqmsfu9KpNBkkhB3ga_m0FHq8j33PhTCU-Vx1oJPRUU2SueD3yfcMRkIUoNIM9tkvQgS1_z0CUtq_khvcO3t4uANU1DfIw/s594/FF2-037%20CEDAW.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="594" data-original-width="456" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHcacZZODek98u9lD3JnsIc1oBzyoWuLie16pJ23rsx90A5zaQC19J75lxs41P_3HTT0tsHuVi-MGOW2Gk7F3mofjPaPAluqmsfu9KpNBkkhB3ga_m0FHq8j33PhTCU-Vx1oJPRUU2SueD3yfcMRkIUoNIM9tkvQgS1_z0CUtq_khvcO3t4uANU1DfIw/s320/FF2-037%20CEDAW.png" width="246" /></a></div>The radical framework was set in 1979, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, a treaty committing member nations to empower women. Instituted in 1981, it has been ratified by 189 nations. This document’s revolutionary emphasis is apparent from articles such as those that call for the complete dismantling of gender roles in the family and in society. Article 5, for example, commits member states to modifying “the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based on the idea of the inferiority or the superiority of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women.” Of course, by stereotyped roles feminists meant primarily that women should cease to be associated with mothering, homemaking, or caregiving. Women’s work in the home is recast as unpaid labor for which resentment and compensation are fully justified. Men’s sacrifices in dirty, dangerous work are not mentioned. </div><div><br /></div><div>The convention also commits member states “To ensure that family education includes a proper understanding of maternity as a social function and the recognition of the common responsibilities of men and women in the upbringing and development of their children” (p. 195). The exact meaning of this statement is unclear, but its upshot is that no matter how many hours a father might put in at an exhausting job, he’d better still get up in the night to change his fair share of diapers. If he doesn’t, his woman is being trained to see his presence in the home as abusive, as a form of “gender-based violence,” which UN documents repeatedly define to include what is seen as coercion or psychological harm. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8PM1Z4WWGp47hopSl5TWtHngIKcxZelt4K4nLMvWwo8ptGAPMEfrthhrbMD3Csy_T8_HLyhWkuE99tLcyBicsGNA-84ub6Kpyw9JK3CfWzGE26PGZQz_bsWhLt8i4-Z6a0PFAhN7mLeJ60cHm9akl3A0wTnDPjwB6uOAMZyQb2aUVzUo78AgIjHCb7w/s1280/FF2-037%2006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="905" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8PM1Z4WWGp47hopSl5TWtHngIKcxZelt4K4nLMvWwo8ptGAPMEfrthhrbMD3Csy_T8_HLyhWkuE99tLcyBicsGNA-84ub6Kpyw9JK3CfWzGE26PGZQz_bsWhLt8i4-Z6a0PFAhN7mLeJ60cHm9akl3A0wTnDPjwB6uOAMZyQb2aUVzUo78AgIjHCb7w/s320/FF2-037%2006.jpg" width="226" /></a></div>This revolutionary manifesto eventually became the cornerstone of UN Women, the explicitly feminist arm of the UN, founded in 2010 to “accelerate” the UN’s goals as laid out in the Convention. UN Women makes no attempt to hide its partisanship, stating clearly that its purpose is to funnel resources toward women on the rationale that women are always and everywhere disadvantaged in relation to men—even when the agency’s own statistics (often dubious and unsourced) fail to prove the case. In one document on “Economic Empowerment of Women,” we learn that “As of 2011, 50.5% of the world’s working women were in vulnerable employment, often unprotected by labor legislation, compared to 48.2% for men.” In other words, about the same proportion of women as of men have precarious work. </div><div><br /></div><div>But that fact gives no one at UN Women a moment’s pause. Whatever the issue, whether it’s AIDS, climate change, or Covid-19, UN Women always starts from the assumption that women are hardest hit and must receive special assistance, and more than that, that helping men doesn’t help women because men oppress women. Women, of course, never oppress men. Nowhere in the UN Women documents is there any emphasis on strengthening cooperation or mutual reliance between men and women, or on building husband-wife or family-based economic partnerships. Quite the opposite: the emphasis is on separating women from men, making women aware of themselves as a subjugated group, and making women less reliant on men (and more reliant on government and global aid programs). </div><div> </div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF59d18LnCHZ6g2DfaIgFpi_-bwokKLxyt8LlAd5h5SR7DRGOslx8NxpTBN67kI_cMnJOJuA-hmOtWkD0AayZBwK5M-EBAMG9EUH9lU8_FP-Xf8sis9lSaYt3__Qo_NoawfHSKDROVY4vUhTGF7gT5_SjC3jnkRUe8Hk3gVNS_nUvl6A61UqGkzL6mGw/s1024/FF2-037%2007.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="1024" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF59d18LnCHZ6g2DfaIgFpi_-bwokKLxyt8LlAd5h5SR7DRGOslx8NxpTBN67kI_cMnJOJuA-hmOtWkD0AayZBwK5M-EBAMG9EUH9lU8_FP-Xf8sis9lSaYt3__Qo_NoawfHSKDROVY4vUhTGF7gT5_SjC3jnkRUe8Hk3gVNS_nUvl6A61UqGkzL6mGw/w400-h200/FF2-037%2007.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />A glance at the home page of UN Women shows the western feminist insistence on matters of sexuality and the transgression of gender norms, which are placed above bread-and-butter issues like clean water, improved roads, or medical care. Many of UN Women’s statements run notably counter to the socially conservative nature of many developing countries. The homepage features, for example, a Statement against homophobia, biphobia, intersexphobia and transphobia, not merely advocating tolerance but proclaiming “This is a day to celebrate the diversity of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) across humanity.” Under the guise of women’s rights, UN Women wants to convince girls in Burundi and Pakistan that they may be trans or bisexual. </div><div><br /></div><div>Another statement on the UN Women site calls for female empowerment to ensure “gender-responsive disaster risk reduction,” alleging that “The more women we have in positions of power, the more likely we are to have more ambitious and stringent climate change and disaster risk reduction policies, a stronger focus on quality of life, and better health and education outcomes for all.” No evidence, of course, is brought forward to support these rather incredible statements of female superiority. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8HX9irA-3Gotgv-07UzWDhIGd-AcDw8UPkpPOAxKf21eFsexuoFtPnjd9KTj7bUzm09WzqYVvWrHnjNIumGJGmsC5lH7Kfa4ppEfuBRX-sPmr1iq08AK9AdkcfAW0K6GvC3Blgx6FFOmhy60aqvqD65IokjOmQIr-_lEfKaKRO9Xu3yWUsos3petqdQ/s960/FF2-037%2008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="960" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8HX9irA-3Gotgv-07UzWDhIGd-AcDw8UPkpPOAxKf21eFsexuoFtPnjd9KTj7bUzm09WzqYVvWrHnjNIumGJGmsC5lH7Kfa4ppEfuBRX-sPmr1iq08AK9AdkcfAW0K6GvC3Blgx6FFOmhy60aqvqD65IokjOmQIr-_lEfKaKRO9Xu3yWUsos3petqdQ/w400-h266/FF2-037%2008.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Another feature page calls for the transformation of gender identities in domestic life, complaining about women’s unequal burden of caring, their unpaid domestic work, and the need for men to embrace “positive masculinity.” Here we see how thoroughly western feminist ideologies have transformed rights and development goals, penetrating into the most private aspects of family life to demand a radical reorientation. </div><div><br /></div><div>In this particular document, called “Gender Equality Starts at Home,” the experience of a married couple in Kyrgyzstan, in Central Asia, is highlighted as an example of positive change: the couple attended a training session on social norms that inspired the wife to lay down the law to her husband. She is reported as saying, “We both work 40 hours a week, but he used to come home from work and lie on the couch watching TV, while I was responsible for doing all the housework in the evenings. Unfortunately, it is acceptable behaviour in our country.” No longer. Now the husband must pull his weight. If he is not able to do so, another section in the same report stresses that having their “own income” brings women more “freedom”—freedom from their husbands, we understand, if not from the organizations that provides financial assistance. </div><div><br /></div><div>These various reports and press releases rarely mention boys and men specifically except as threats to girls and women, and as subjects for control and re-education in order that the superior leadership and caretaking skills of girls and women be allowed to flourish unimpeded. The importance of men to family life or to secure, prosperous societies is never emphasized. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqA6g4WdqgI2tG4HCKFSNP3dWrJ43esY6GElus5jmO9KcOFx2mPVHARsl2to3i6YVEq_dBdM7nIb30xpdpFofBW8e9ihPi1IqDPaTAzzVksrXlXPdk6JDThe4g3NG9xHEcdZrR2dY1kgRmGB3m3jEl6fSV65zpVlk4cRRwWGupKxiPBe1FcPAsZw7RxA/s600/FF2-037%2009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="600" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqA6g4WdqgI2tG4HCKFSNP3dWrJ43esY6GElus5jmO9KcOFx2mPVHARsl2to3i6YVEq_dBdM7nIb30xpdpFofBW8e9ihPi1IqDPaTAzzVksrXlXPdk6JDThe4g3NG9xHEcdZrR2dY1kgRmGB3m3jEl6fSV65zpVlk4cRRwWGupKxiPBe1FcPAsZw7RxA/w400-h266/FF2-037%2009.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />No agency more starkly illustrates the transformation of the UN from a humanitarian organization to a global arm of the feminist lobby than UNICEF, originally the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, now simply the UN Children’s Fund, originally established in 1946 “to help children and young people whose lives and futures were at risk.” Decades of effort during famines and disease outbreaks garnered UNICEF some moral legitimacy, until its mission began to change markedly in the 1990s with the incorporation of feminist frameworks and emphasis. Stephen Baskerville quotes researcher Douglas Silva, who has noted that “In a world in which children, both boys and girls, suffer on a massive scale … the suffering of girls now seems to take precedence at UNICEF. When boys are disadvantaged, for whatever reason, it simply seems that this disadvantage does not matter” (p. 256). </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUbWo5Bst6t2l9Z-EynmBHUPcVvyII5EyzJUwO6rBnCTTZ9dHJEyFjui_N-hSZ_13xbJ3PgfJgqiB-pW9zlIXXFiyPSkxEAOX1rpcA9iToUuHvdVp4AcBHhNJfFUMWFT_KedsvuW62NKdHX_cKmOTjFKljRL4ZXjDIeI6cDVCnN64mvyFZeqg11bB98w/s848/FF2-037%20-child-soldier-72568127%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="840" data-original-width="848" height="198" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUbWo5Bst6t2l9Z-EynmBHUPcVvyII5EyzJUwO6rBnCTTZ9dHJEyFjui_N-hSZ_13xbJ3PgfJgqiB-pW9zlIXXFiyPSkxEAOX1rpcA9iToUuHvdVp4AcBHhNJfFUMWFT_KedsvuW62NKdHX_cKmOTjFKljRL4ZXjDIeI6cDVCnN64mvyFZeqg11bB98w/w200-h198/FF2-037%20-child-soldier-72568127%20b.png" width="200" /></a></div></div><div>UNICEF claims to “work for every child, everywhere, to build a better world for everyone.” Yet on its “Core Commitments” page can be found links to sections on “Equity” and “Gender Equality and Empowerment of Girls and Women,” and anyone who thinks that UNICEF is still an organization primarily aimed at helping children must read the “Gender Equality” page, which explains that “Context-specific gender analysis informs the design and delivery of programmes in all sectors” of UNICEF’s work, and that “Programmes intentionally promote positive behaviour and social change toward gender equality, especially by empowering adolescent girls.” Do boys matter to UNICEF? Yes, they must be recruited to help with the empowerment of girls. We are told that “Men and boys are mobilized to support and promote gender equality and the rights and engagement of women and girls.” UNICEF is not hiding the fact that in countries where little boys are malnourished in the millions or being recruited as child soldiers, UNICEF’s priority is for them to have the opportunity to understand that their masculinity can be reshaped in feminist-compliant ways. </div></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMEhFslcvQ15FFi2XBPs6pd9418FC1Bh9t-AcRzgwiubKWoWM_QFu6jtwPyNZInic32r8OeHOO4kGXlCn9GHiqo2PPtfJYorUuCYJMUaHJuru5iTbQ6xQb8_Dh1Hdj7rFgQlPoY1_CuSpkw17hfFQJ94J575sPOEGqRS99kcCO9fd6Zt0DOCk0ML6tiA/s4285/FF2-037%20malnourshed%20boy%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2873" data-original-width="4285" height="215" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMEhFslcvQ15FFi2XBPs6pd9418FC1Bh9t-AcRzgwiubKWoWM_QFu6jtwPyNZInic32r8OeHOO4kGXlCn9GHiqo2PPtfJYorUuCYJMUaHJuru5iTbQ6xQb8_Dh1Hdj7rFgQlPoY1_CuSpkw17hfFQJ94J575sPOEGqRS99kcCO9fd6Zt0DOCk0ML6tiA/w320-h215/FF2-037%20malnourshed%20boy%20b.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Malnourished boy</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></div><div>I will not detail all the links demonstrating the feminist bias of UNICEF. Whether discussing violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, food scarcity for millions of children in the Horn of Africa, or the dire conditions of over one million Rohingya in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, UNICEF’s report writers simply cannot maintain a focus on children, continually turning towards the situation of “girls and women.” In their report on the situation in the eastern Congo, authors refer in one sentence to “high levels of sexual exploitation of children” and in the next sentence to “the impact on the physical and mental health of girls and women.” Suffering boys rhetorically disappear and are replaced by women, as UNICEF calls for “a halt to the large-scale sexual exploitation of girls and women.” It is well known that significant numbers of boys and men experience sexual violence in conflict zones. Just a few years ago, the United Nations Security Council formally recognized this long-ignored reality. Yet UNICEF reports as if it were not so.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9ReT8mUMmRSwn4qmNjAd14mCv7KEyzAefZIlyhms-uLYyms1Z4ri40b3mKeRmS_0MxpXup2vT3GLIGCofcrOe7GVepGNnIda1Ckw7LSh-25E3mc74n7ha5EEmNumNri7-NRcYWFpe5QfSLFmpVi6yyIm1f7Doz4Yli3MdgjMj3Ik5a9ZQJyhAjrZzag/s770/FF2-037%2012.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="770" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9ReT8mUMmRSwn4qmNjAd14mCv7KEyzAefZIlyhms-uLYyms1Z4ri40b3mKeRmS_0MxpXup2vT3GLIGCofcrOe7GVepGNnIda1Ckw7LSh-25E3mc74n7ha5EEmNumNri7-NRcYWFpe5QfSLFmpVi6yyIm1f7Doz4Yli3MdgjMj3Ik5a9ZQJyhAjrZzag/w400-h219/FF2-037%2012.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />In the report on the Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh, the report authors are particularly concerned about family practices, lamenting that girls are “being forced into early marriage and being left out of school as parents keep them home.” This they include in the category of “gender-based violence” amongst the Rohingya. Whether there are reasons why parents prefer to keep their daughters at home (perhaps it’s dangerous to send them to school) and whether the Rohingya have traditionally practiced early marriage for girls—there is simply no explanation. Remarkably, at a time when over one million displaced people lack access to adequate water and proper sanitation, UNICEF emphasizes the blaming of parents for making decisions about their daughters. The emphasis seems wildly out of place—though it is fully in line with feminist ideology’s obsession with the family as a site of patriarchal abuse.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnw3T0uqshtEOtq99XQl7R83M_BjhyhyJ4lpWNrMrsSfxf_wZKB2dVf5xYHI-o0h845F1o3S2XwTgqIowsNZk4LlUAv1M7jE2sUXVMbkkZJSk0tkvmzBIDSdgO3n1k9qVQ_0IphSKkvd0jE4LU0iOkCgrO0HngOBfMq69znphb7p_IA41SOZ2SSFl93A/s1920/FF2-037%20Unicef%20Rohinga.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="1920" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnw3T0uqshtEOtq99XQl7R83M_BjhyhyJ4lpWNrMrsSfxf_wZKB2dVf5xYHI-o0h845F1o3S2XwTgqIowsNZk4LlUAv1M7jE2sUXVMbkkZJSk0tkvmzBIDSdgO3n1k9qVQ_0IphSKkvd0jE4LU0iOkCgrO0HngOBfMq69znphb7p_IA41SOZ2SSFl93A/w400-h266/FF2-037%20Unicef%20Rohinga.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>The message is clear in these various UN and UN-related documents. What the world needs is not so much clean water, food security, medicine, peace treaties, and economic development, with a focus on strengthening families and supporting the shared empowerment of fathers and mothers. It needs the fruits of western feminism: women who get the message that they may be better off raising their children without men; women who see themselves as an oppressed class; and women coming to understand that sexual liberation is an important choice. We have seen the damage being wrought in the highly prosperous and stable democratic nations of the west by this ideology. The devastation promised for Africa and many other poor areas is incalculable.</div><div><br /></div><div>Some good news may be found in the fact that some countries are not very interested in feminist revolution. The bad news is that the devastating seduction of reliance on aid monies and the promise to women that they will be better off without men, will exert its insidious power, while the useful work these organizations might be undertaking has been compromised. Unfortunately, feminists show no signs of backing off their project to control the world. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> Janice Fiamengo</span><br /></div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span><br />Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-71078325875319368222023-06-12T15:04:00.002-04:002023-06-12T15:04:39.034-04:00Feminism’s Society-Wide Campaign to Emasculate Men - Janice Fiamengo<div>We have seen the remarkably rapid progress of feminist ideology and policies from the 1970s on. From its first toeholds in women’s studies programs, feminism gained respectability and influence, soon spreading its tentacles into nearly all academic disciplines, eventually corrupting research in a wide range of fields, perhaps most damagingly in Psychology, Sociology, History, and now Biology. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5G9pij6sN2Eeh5gDL9FWeze8DvuNkz6vQjj6G_d99Fdq1BmShgEJi4CrjIrbjTZK6eDToFacf4UHZ0k8zZv99yWj7gqfbUiVsRopdXdfi6Q01bnK--aIUX8xZUxIPR2-jDpBMbH5PD06WLjc6Rku_NIAkIpJYkIpZ00IajRLMeDVPS0EH7FAyPWB0Ow/s634/FF2-036%20p01%20University%20women%20degree.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="594" data-original-width="634" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5G9pij6sN2Eeh5gDL9FWeze8DvuNkz6vQjj6G_d99Fdq1BmShgEJi4CrjIrbjTZK6eDToFacf4UHZ0k8zZv99yWj7gqfbUiVsRopdXdfi6Q01bnK--aIUX8xZUxIPR2-jDpBMbH5PD06WLjc6Rku_NIAkIpJYkIpZ00IajRLMeDVPS0EH7FAyPWB0Ow/w200-h188/FF2-036%20p01%20University%20women%20degree.png" width="200" /></a></div><br /><div>At the same time, feminism transformed the workplace through affirmative action and other special programs to hire, promote, and empower women simply because they were women, over-riding meritocratic and market principles.</div><div><br /></div><div>These two massive victories for the women’s movement would alone have secured the transformation of the English-speaking world, as women were shoe-horned into many powerful positions they hadn’t earned and as feminist ideas about male privilege and female victimization spread throughout society. In a relatively short time, feminist graduates from the universities carried their resentful zeal into the fields of journalism, social work, criminology, entertainment, economics, medicine, law, and business. </div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div>And feminists never stopped pushing to implement ever more radical initiatives, many of which have successfully marginalized men and demonized masculinity. </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdY-17fQqOPpcH2XTdBNdRvx-1utJxHeq_dJeWsy4N11Qh0AcYkwoMnq2tjD9QVCF7tKC8fGELhj5EKB8LcbJ16QuhhPSAGc-6Yv_G-cLRw9qTM7U3HvGPnCv3gzJOzU4VcVW9BkCc8FJ2l8lgdWFMdoVKclG8bcRcnzghZmy3V2SDGZTMRQlANbtoPA/s816/FF2-036%20p24b%20justin_trudeau%202.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="816" data-original-width="795" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdY-17fQqOPpcH2XTdBNdRvx-1utJxHeq_dJeWsy4N11Qh0AcYkwoMnq2tjD9QVCF7tKC8fGELhj5EKB8LcbJ16QuhhPSAGc-6Yv_G-cLRw9qTM7U3HvGPnCv3gzJOzU4VcVW9BkCc8FJ2l8lgdWFMdoVKclG8bcRcnzghZmy3V2SDGZTMRQlANbtoPA/w195-h200/FF2-036%20p24b%20justin_trudeau%202.png" width="195" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Justin Trudeau</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>Unfortunately, male political leaders and voters have gone along with, even enthusiastically endorsed, such initiatives—some because they wished to be fair to women, some because it seemed useless to protest, and some because they saw in such initiatives a far-reaching lever of power, a way to weaken male competitors, guaranteeing male compliance and submission as these more powerful men executed their self-serving designs. The most feminist men, as we’ve seen, are often the most ruthlessly self-promoting; for them, a surface adherence to feminist ideals enables the signaling of mate-status and the securing of dominance over other men.</div><div><br /></div><div>The most dramatic and far-reaching of feminist interventions was the introduction of no-fault divorce and the associated legal and family court machinery that quickly developed alongside it, as divorce quickly became a substantial source of revenue and power for many state-accredited professionals. As Stephen Baskerville has shown in many articles and books such as Taken Into Custody and The New Politics of Sex, no-fault divorce, first signed into law in 1969 by California governor Ronald Reagan, launched a severe assault on the bedrock of society—the family—which feminists had long touted as “oppressive” for women and in need of dismantling. And dismantle it they did.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitbnsFS5sCggERQ6GGSs8LzOec5xXxdGxgfp7h3hAbKP8s5716PALkllbGhb-43wKldX_OVcON40sS5kVU1Me2LnZ5HlRWqrZo4WrGUYfD1s9bM8JuRk0PjSivpUKci_NEmp_Xn4kyQzxFVdo1EznqDUzu__9EEoAqm3wHrXkHyQ_Ll3RFmRGcKgrxEg/s1090/FF2-036%20p04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="548" data-original-width="1090" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitbnsFS5sCggERQ6GGSs8LzOec5xXxdGxgfp7h3hAbKP8s5716PALkllbGhb-43wKldX_OVcON40sS5kVU1Me2LnZ5HlRWqrZo4WrGUYfD1s9bM8JuRk0PjSivpUKci_NEmp_Xn4kyQzxFVdo1EznqDUzu__9EEoAqm3wHrXkHyQ_Ll3RFmRGcKgrxEg/w400-h201/FF2-036%20p04.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>No-fault divorce meant, in law and in practice, that a man’s marriage could be unilaterally dissolved without his consent, at which time he could be evicted from the home he had paid for, which in many cases became the ex-wife’s family home; could have his children taken away from him, able to see them only as his ex-wife permitted; could be prevented from seeing his children altogether if his ex-wife claimed, even with no evidence, that he had been abusive or threatening, could be forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to determine the degree of danger he might pose to his once-family; could have his bank accounts raided to support his ex-wife and former children; and could even be jailed based on the word of his spouse—with no evidence of wrongdoing required, simply because his wife wanted it and was willing to make a case for it. </div><div><br /></div><div>The new laws to liberate women from unhappy marriages while protecting their financial well-being not only wrecked families, impoverished fathers, and left children traumatized and often broken, but gave the state unprecedented powers over individual men (and some women): the power to detain, plunder, and prosecute them without any of the established legal protections such as the presumption of innocence and due process of law. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKAwEO_hwZBidWQy5IQBOixG-NNLan11B_sjNu9a2F17TpMn3Vj7-X1pI8KIZXY6o5WrbOwv66DwsPez-zyIiCIEpvHyxfpsyJSS5WcASG7t1VpG7kziMIVVdxxpFcGFIhaA5W2r7ONCQQxQ-LHmtK7VCpXF1ws_ztN8qR0ByIcM-dwCpybOa74JQP7w/s1655/FF2-036%20p05%20b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="943" data-original-width="1655" height="228" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKAwEO_hwZBidWQy5IQBOixG-NNLan11B_sjNu9a2F17TpMn3Vj7-X1pI8KIZXY6o5WrbOwv66DwsPez-zyIiCIEpvHyxfpsyJSS5WcASG7t1VpG7kziMIVVdxxpFcGFIhaA5W2r7ONCQQxQ-LHmtK7VCpXF1ws_ztN8qR0ByIcM-dwCpybOa74JQP7w/w400-h228/FF2-036%20p05%20b.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>Fathers who could not pay what family courts decided they should pay could find themselves homeless, barred altogether from seeing their children, mentally devastated, or even in prison; all this while having committed no crime other than failing to maintain the love and respect of their ex-wives. Feminist ideology, broadcast from every university and represented in many magazines, movies, advertisements, and newspaper op/eds, had been telling women for years that they should withdraw their love and respect as a gesture of female empowerment. </div><div><br /></div><div>Women often presented their decision to divorce as an act of self-empowerment, and were applauded for it. If fathers tried to fight back to maintain their right to parent their children, feminists declared that they were doing so not out of love but in order to abuse. </div><div><br /></div><div>We will never know the number of men who have been imprisoned or have killed themselves as a result of this horrific legal transformation that has taken place with little general awareness and with negligible protest. </div><div><br /></div><div>The new family court system has weaponized lawyers, judges, court-appointed therapists, and social workers, who reap huge profits from divorce and the resulting social and personal mayhem. Multiple generations of children of divorce have grown up hating their fathers and unable to function effectively in society; the lawyers, social workers, and therapists have grown rich colluding in the disaster. </div><div><br /></div><div>Of course it is not only family court law that has undergone such a profound transformation; many other areas of law have also been affected by feminist ideas and feminist activists. </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigaJ6yXSWN4vN62DMdyTRzpWyeuOUP3w6lzCRzIx9gCp8bLoy5GACxKECkjbTEPHaEP9AaKu0imNv3pbhvHtJ6GM3ZY_azH5YPP6HReyz3cYTee9WwshUbgo6ngekTjcAmkTGH8DAMh_Vxxf5exQmhzrEeZ_1F_DjfGva9tynfgXEhqZDOehDumz7BmQ/s1280/FF2-036%20p08.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1280" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigaJ6yXSWN4vN62DMdyTRzpWyeuOUP3w6lzCRzIx9gCp8bLoy5GACxKECkjbTEPHaEP9AaKu0imNv3pbhvHtJ6GM3ZY_azH5YPP6HReyz3cYTee9WwshUbgo6ngekTjcAmkTGH8DAMh_Vxxf5exQmhzrEeZ_1F_DjfGva9tynfgXEhqZDOehDumz7BmQ/w200-h160/FF2-036%20p08.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">Jian Ghomeshi</span></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>The law of sexual assault, always highly charged, has been thoroughly politicized and all its procedures re-shaped to accommodate a feminist worldview that sees brutal male perpetrators exercising power over helpless female victims. The politicization of rape—or sexual assault as it is now called—has involved training or indoctrinating police officers, lawyers, and judges, ostensibly to correct rape myths but really to inculcate belief in women’s claims; it has also involved a successful attack on accused men’s avenues of legal defense. Affirmative consent laws have modernized the definition of rape so that it is no longer necessary for the accuser to have said No—merely for her not to have said Yes. </div><div><br /></div><div>As attested in famous cases across North America such as those involving the Duke University Lacrosse team, Canadian media personality Jian Ghomeshi, and disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, untrustworthy witnesses and abundant evidence of consent are not enough to exonerate those who find themselves accused of sexual crime. Even email and text messages by accusers sent to their alleged rapists saying how much they enjoyed the date, for example, can be explained away as insincere or somehow coerced. Trauma theory, employed abundantly in the Weinstein trial, can redefine women’s statements of consent as attempts by a victim to placate her abuser or to normalize her assault. Even when the complainant has gone on to have a long-term sexual relationship with her alleged abuser, that merely becomes evidence of the depth of her trauma. </div><div><br /></div><div>According to the new feminist theory of rape and male power, nothing the accuser does can prove she has lied; nothing said or done by the accused can secure his acquittal, whether in the court of law or the court of public opinion. As Baskerville sums up, the process for adjudicating rape “is openly rigged in favor of conviction. Rape accusers remain anonymous, but the accused do not, even after the accusation is demonstrated to be false. The past sexual history of the accuser is not admissible as evidence, but that of the accused is. Accusers are exempt from polygraph tests, but not the accused. Even a history of false accusations [by the accuser] is not admissible” (p. 133). Despite all this, feminist activists and politicians routinely lament a lower-than-desired conviction rate—outright admitting that they see most or all accused men as guilty. </div><div><br /></div><div>The feminist obsession with what Baskerville calls “gender crimes” does not stop with new definitions and procedures for sexual assault; it has also created new crimes and new procedures, including quasi-judicial tribunals for adjudicating claims of sexual misconduct on university campuses. Here the rules of evidence and procedures are even more biased than in a court of law, often involving investigation by ideologues with no legal training, the denial of an accused’s right to a lawyer, the denial of his right to know the evidence against him, and a lowered standard for determining guilt. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRsqh8lcnslMF_8i0B9QFJBMM1x92azSjBefzT6bz1n6BmljWq35abyon6hHuWSJXxpFzfL0j2ea5bVSFLrn1HSyalwa2yo7eoqI3nkQ-1iz98XzcdcBfduTwaLGtMWWBnmd66v1dvTXI_JYP4SGMVl-_5hSq2uNjdOb7vHa5V2RTpBqNYx-ua88rK_g/s1917/FF2-036%20p29%20Workplace%20dating.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1077" data-original-width="1917" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRsqh8lcnslMF_8i0B9QFJBMM1x92azSjBefzT6bz1n6BmljWq35abyon6hHuWSJXxpFzfL0j2ea5bVSFLrn1HSyalwa2yo7eoqI3nkQ-1iz98XzcdcBfduTwaLGtMWWBnmd66v1dvTXI_JYP4SGMVl-_5hSq2uNjdOb7vHa5V2RTpBqNYx-ua88rK_g/w400-h225/FF2-036%20p29%20Workplace%20dating.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Likewise, anti-harassment policies in schools and workplaces make a firing offence of many perfectly legal and hitherto acceptable acts such as requests for dates, compliments, inappropriate jokes, suggestive conversations, or even intent looking. As Baskerville phrases it, it is now possible “to punish any sexual or romantic interaction between men and women under any circumstances, if the woman complains to the authorities” (p. 157). The taint of male sexual guilt so adamantly proclaimed by feminists has led to the creation of offences for which only men, essentially, can be guilty, including stalking, cat-calling, hate speech, online harassment, and street harassment. These are transgressions invented by ideologues in order to stigmatize masculinity and sideline men.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqbKk6Tkwb8Boa54tgAGjeyT-qyVOYniDxzTdPtgE4IUIfSclx91rArFxYjs8R3XVuaChmEEmIO_q0KF6U9cawN4BpV7x9Z3tdg6rkqKZ1O8FSAm49NWaWZVIfHAiywwZZDfqprswKjJPBwrxOuB6q6MhqtVj8p4CEIe5kfnCDxfTqk-Rk_esW4tqbRQ/s1600/FF2-036%20p11%20b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="644" data-original-width="1600" height="161" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqbKk6Tkwb8Boa54tgAGjeyT-qyVOYniDxzTdPtgE4IUIfSclx91rArFxYjs8R3XVuaChmEEmIO_q0KF6U9cawN4BpV7x9Z3tdg6rkqKZ1O8FSAm49NWaWZVIfHAiywwZZDfqprswKjJPBwrxOuB6q6MhqtVj8p4CEIe5kfnCDxfTqk-Rk_esW4tqbRQ/w400-h161/FF2-036%20p11%20b.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Indeed, at the same time that affirmative action and equity hiring policies are giving women special access to a variety of coveted jobs, harassment and misconduct legislation have been making it increasingly easy for women to push men out of their positions, merely by complaining to authorities. Feminism flagrantly envisions a world in which women lead and men hope to escape persecution.</div><div><br /></div><div>As the entirety of the media, Hollywood, advertising, and social media platforms have been overtaken by feminism, we have seen constant attacks on alleged male villainy and constant foregrounding of women’s issues in everything from air conditioning in offices to rates of pay and childcare provision. Whatever the subject, whether economic trends or the Covid pandemic; marital infidelity or federal budgets; climate change or the war in Ukraine, everything must be seen primarily from the woman’s point of view and through the lens of victimology. Dreary and predictable as it all became a long time ago, still the feminist perspective must never be allowed to rest. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHxOIOYqPtsBZ5ool9e14O-A12NtJCyOLDjj_5BhffHYGn53X71zF6fh6BWyB9Yrw7jxPOT9xkQ2sqJvyQ5Sd2t4RtnD_T7I-JjwkQDemZibwneVwqDy2EGMTCC0POqjKeGUL6xedTVMXhJN-mIcwF2_mP9Go_FOgGU3pV18_u20sUYJzFAL0hCQud4g/s2121/FF2-036%20p12%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="825" data-original-width="2121" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHxOIOYqPtsBZ5ool9e14O-A12NtJCyOLDjj_5BhffHYGn53X71zF6fh6BWyB9Yrw7jxPOT9xkQ2sqJvyQ5Sd2t4RtnD_T7I-JjwkQDemZibwneVwqDy2EGMTCC0POqjKeGUL6xedTVMXhJN-mIcwF2_mP9Go_FOgGU3pV18_u20sUYJzFAL0hCQud4g/w400-h155/FF2-036%20p12%20b.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>The men it has all been practiced on, the thousands falsely accused, put through the hell of divorce, alienated from their children, fired from their jobs, investigated by the police, or merely hectored about their privilege, their mansplaining, their manspreading, their sexual entitlement, their over-representation in certain spheres, their need to walk a mile in her shoes and defer to superior feminine leadership and team-building—these men are not allowed even to tell their experience. If they attempt to do so, they will be accused of misogyny.</div><div><br /></div><div>Through it all, the mantra is repeated: more must be done for women! Even the transgender phenomenon can be discussed only as it relates to women’s preferences, opportunities, and privileges. Where it does not inconvenience women, it does not exist.</div><div><br /></div><div>While it was once possible to discuss what was best for society, recognizing the special needs and requirements of children, the feminist movement has drowned out all voices but those that focus narrowly on the protections and privileges of women. The result is a wide range of policies and laws that not only create enormous injustice for men but also destroy the basis of family life, individual privacy, individual freedom, and the rule of law. </div><div><br /></div><div>The feminist influence is so profound as to imperil the continued functioning of society itself—its ability to nurture the next generation, pass on knowledge and skills, value excellence, pursue justice, and maintain social order. </div><div><br /></div><div>Feminism is at root not only a war on men, though it definitely is that, an unceasing, relentless, and hate-fueled attack on every vulnerable boy and man. It is also an increasingly successful war on civilization itself. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> Janice Fiamengo</div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-53132319076107160272023-06-12T14:36:00.002-04:002023-06-12T14:36:54.384-04:00Second Wave Feminism and Casual Male-Extermination - Janice Fiamengo<div>Many feminists approve the idea of killing men. </div><div><br /></div><div>One of the most striking features of modern feminism is its advocacy of anti-male violence. When this feature is noted, feminist ideologues typically respond that such advocacy is marginal, put forward by women with no real status within feminism, and not at all representative of the equality movement that we should all support. However, even a cursory investigation of feminist leaders’ words reveals that, far from being exceptional, advocacy of violent hatred is in the mainstream of the movement. </div><div><br /></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWqL1Y5AHbkoE3CbUQzfsmX2Os7M33_BRXyAlJvQxg3YFZH-Gix1W8hk4tNEovf5ubkuB9ntnMQpNk7IiMGVJ7sqXt9d2QDYt4h6dR2_Y2Ffsv8SeMif4mcFpDFJzh8WKbVSMgJFbdJzt0jtjeT9i_06y5P6Xn4jEV4LlrY4X0KIrunNpO-1EZsSIiPg/s737/FF2-035%20p01%20b.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="737" data-original-width="541" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWqL1Y5AHbkoE3CbUQzfsmX2Os7M33_BRXyAlJvQxg3YFZH-Gix1W8hk4tNEovf5ubkuB9ntnMQpNk7IiMGVJ7sqXt9d2QDYt4h6dR2_Y2Ffsv8SeMif4mcFpDFJzh8WKbVSMgJFbdJzt0jtjeT9i_06y5P6Xn4jEV4LlrY4X0KIrunNpO-1EZsSIiPg/s320/FF2-035%20p01%20b.png" width="235" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mona Eltahawy</td></tr></tbody></table></div><div>The case of Mona Eltahawy, popular Egyptian-American feminist author, who in 2019 published The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, provides a vivid, relatively recent example. Mona Eltahawy is a violent woman who gushes about the thrill of assaulting a man at a Montreal nightclub and repeatedly promotes vigilante killings of men by women. No less than Gloria Steinem endorsed the book, declaring that “Reading this book will free you, and acting on it will free us all.”</div><div><br /></div><div>In the book, Eltahawy exults that, “After I beat the fuck out of the man who groped me in a club in Montreal, I went home on a high. It was glorious.” She says that she described her attack on Twitter with the hashtag #IBeatMyAssaulter,” which was soon shared thousands of times. </div><div><br /></div><div>Though Eltahawy repeatedly claims in the book that a patriarchal society punishes women far more harshly than it does men for acts of violence (a claim that is demonstrably untrue, as Law Professor Sonja Starr’s research has conclusively shown), she never does explain why, if that is the case, she was never prosecuted or even interviewed by police for the disproportionate violence she boasted about committing. </div><div><br /></div><div>Eltahawy enthusiastically outlines a program of anti-male jihad at length: “Imagine if we fuck-this-shit snapped, en masse, and systematically killed men, for no reason at all other than for being men. Imagine this culling starting in one country with five men a week. Then each week, this imaginary scenario would add more countries and kill more men in each of them. Fifty a week, then one hundred men, then five hundred.” Hardly able to contain her glee, she contends that such killing would be a viable way to convince the so-called worldwide patriarchy to take seriously women’s demands.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is a sick fantasy rather than a pragmatic political program, as Eltahawy’s emphasis on male fear and death make clear: “How would men feel when they saw so many of their fellow men murdered simply for being, like them, men?” she asks with relish. What Eltahawy is describing is already closer to reality for men than for women, as throughout the world, men make up more than 80% of global homicide victims. For Eltahawy, however, that’s not enough. </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhF-FJhmP1MHxOV-PO8C3JhCbUmp9e1vHsKgkiqymj0XdGtgd26tL2JuFO3cXvtd-QCJlBbKMC036XwtdD4lbtzakNsUbN_qTvG_y_LQRwUZWA4jHlldFzOEnK_kV6RwZpzNJSy-2M4rL7tyZdEqQWj3Gihp-QYg7F-iMCiHDgUXcJBJlK492O6AZVNQ/s2560/FF2-035%20Mary%20Anne%20Franks%20b.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="1878" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhF-FJhmP1MHxOV-PO8C3JhCbUmp9e1vHsKgkiqymj0XdGtgd26tL2JuFO3cXvtd-QCJlBbKMC036XwtdD4lbtzakNsUbN_qTvG_y_LQRwUZWA4jHlldFzOEnK_kV6RwZpzNJSy-2M4rL7tyZdEqQWj3Gihp-QYg7F-iMCiHDgUXcJBJlK492O6AZVNQ/w147-h200/FF2-035%20Mary%20Anne%20Franks%20b.png" width="147" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mary Anne Franks </td></tr></tbody></table><div><br /></div><div>She quotes University of Miami Law Professor Mary Anne Franks that “Society would be better off as a whole if more women were willing to engage in justified violence against men […]. To that end, women’s justified violence against men should be encouraged, protected, and publicized” (p. 141). </div><div><br /></div><div>Not surprisingly, a precise definition of “justified” violence is never forthcoming in a book that rails hysterically against the patriarchy. One begins to suspect that “justified” violence is pretty much anything a woman might think it should be. But what about the vast majority of innocent men who have no power, have never committed violence against women, and cannot by any stretch of the imagination be seen to deserve to be murdered? They may have to die too, Eltahawy admits. Quoting the Professor of Law again, she notes that “An increase in women’s violence and aggression must be tolerated even if such violence violates traditional proportionality principles in individual instances. However regrettable it may be that in individual cases some women will overreact and perhaps even consciously exploit increased tolerance of their use of violence, creating fear and uncertainty about the possibility of women’s retaliatory force serves the overall goal of redistributing violence” (p. 144). </div><div><br /></div><div>In other words, however “regrettable” it may be that some women, maybe even quite a few, will kill innocent men simply because they can, that would still serve the overall goal of empowering women. It’s not clear what Eltahawy would have women do if they found themselves on the receiving end of defensive or even retaliatory violence by men—or indeed by women outraged at the attack on their fathers, husbands, lovers, brothers, and sons. If feminist women are going to be allowed to kill men with impunity, why shouldn’t non-feminist women be allowed to kill feminists with impunity? Eltahawy’s desire to see men hurt and killed is obviously far more important to her than any actual improvement in women’s status or security. </div><div><br /></div><div>Unfortunately, this unholy obsession with male death has a well-established history in feminist thought that feminism as a whole has singularly failed to condemn.</div><div><br /></div><div>Though it extends all the way back to the beginnings of feminism—as for example in Frances Swiney’s female supremacist tracts at the end of the nineteenth century (which I discussed in an earlier video)—it has some prominent recent precursors, specifically one of the major American feminist foremothers, author Valerie Solanas. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7EBICVjbsNJKUqHWmUcQrcPxbCXEDz2JiacN1Z28PAJnctR2FUcXG31BlhTUgsAtEPZLSDrTfnhskdelJqjrhYuyEhuz7mt11YTrMU-FFf--63KWT5O6-b6d2Jy8a4IwRxkFjc8EJgBeQv7s9WEY0y5wTE2mTiqfgVdYYe_A3v5ugaQHZuXY-_7iVHA/s1551/FF2-035%20p05b%20Solanas.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="872" data-original-width="1551" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7EBICVjbsNJKUqHWmUcQrcPxbCXEDz2JiacN1Z28PAJnctR2FUcXG31BlhTUgsAtEPZLSDrTfnhskdelJqjrhYuyEhuz7mt11YTrMU-FFf--63KWT5O6-b6d2Jy8a4IwRxkFjc8EJgBeQv7s9WEY0y5wTE2mTiqfgVdYYe_A3v5ugaQHZuXY-_7iVHA/w400-h225/FF2-035%20p05b%20Solanas.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>Solanas styled herself an exterminator of men. Her SCUM Manifesto, published in 1967, declared her conviction that all men, not just abusive ones, were sub-human: “To be male is to be deficient” (35). </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoi6YcPa5pVNJjvP_0jnej7Y35ZQzFBePVlWU-eVxw-sGZyaXTfhD1prDsv0_vGjeXUbb2kUw8VK8QGCMuUN1wyycGKZJVGxKN405eKnmwLOIkFrOZqy8oe3Yd_PE1rHlPQ5H2I9FkwIPxxlBoc0SFmeSMn3CCjmQ1zhPKLMWKN86pWZDCO97kNBiYxQ/s1050/FF2-035%20p06b%20Scum%20Manifesto.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1050" data-original-width="577" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoi6YcPa5pVNJjvP_0jnej7Y35ZQzFBePVlWU-eVxw-sGZyaXTfhD1prDsv0_vGjeXUbb2kUw8VK8QGCMuUN1wyycGKZJVGxKN405eKnmwLOIkFrOZqy8oe3Yd_PE1rHlPQ5H2I9FkwIPxxlBoc0SFmeSMn3CCjmQ1zhPKLMWKN86pWZDCO97kNBiYxQ/w110-h200/FF2-035%20p06b%20Scum%20Manifesto.png" width="110" /></a></div>Anticipating many feminist claims that would follow, she said that “The male is eaten up with [...] frustration at not being female” (64) and “eaten up with hate—not rational hate that is directed at those who abuse or insult you—but irrational, indiscriminate hate ... hatred, at bottom, of his own worthless self” (64). In other words, women are right to hate men; and men who hate women really hate men. </div><div><br /></div><div>Solanas asserted that “Just as humans have a prior right to existence over dogs by virtue of being more highly evolved and having a superior consciousness, so women have a prior right to existence over men” and that “The elimination of any male is, therefore, a righteous and good act, […] highly beneficial to women as well as an act of mercy” (67). The book was endorsed by The Guardian newspaper as “articulate, angry and funny.” </div><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQScow6Qn2t6Q-wHGE6f6aflAskLzRnY-t2GsTdeJ5MFgTaM5GyYKcbAsW0NW52AHT0rh5RKXWZWOu-npejZsDdlR1Gn6YDE2SvA-FRaTKXivOzWamHKSmefVMvx_vIRyLAVDSKdJRP7tQc17dXYp77HcUEq-ttxkg7pRfrBNri7sBXcgpq4OHEp7sFQ/s1800/FF2-035%20Andy%20Warhol%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1800" data-original-width="1200" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQScow6Qn2t6Q-wHGE6f6aflAskLzRnY-t2GsTdeJ5MFgTaM5GyYKcbAsW0NW52AHT0rh5RKXWZWOu-npejZsDdlR1Gn6YDE2SvA-FRaTKXivOzWamHKSmefVMvx_vIRyLAVDSKdJRP7tQc17dXYp77HcUEq-ttxkg7pRfrBNri7sBXcgpq4OHEp7sFQ/w133-h200/FF2-035%20Andy%20Warhol%20b.png" width="133" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andy Warhol</td></tr></tbody></table>In the year following the writing of her manifesto, in June of 1968, Solanas enacted her righteousness and mercy by attempting to kill artist Andy Warhol, shooting him three times with a .32 caliber Beretta handgun, reportedly because she believed he was planning to steal the contents of a play she had been pestering him to produce at his avant-garde studio and gathering place, The Factory, in New York City. She also shot art critic Mario Amaya, though he was not seriously wounded, and attempted to shoot Warhol’s manager Fred Hughes. </div><br /><div>Warhol suffered near-fatal injury from the shooting. Two bullets pierced his stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus, and both lungs. He was briefly declared dead, had to undergo various surgeries, and had to wear a surgical corset for the rest of his life to hold his organs in place. He became terrified of hospitals and eccentric people, and preoccupied with thoughts of death. </div><div><br /></div><div>It's possible to downplay Solanas’s murder attempts on the ground that she was mentally ill. Solanas was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, pleaded guilty to “reckless assault”, and received a sentence of 3 years, with one year time served. But the reaction to the murder attempts by Solanas’s many allegedly sane feminist acolytes is a different story. On the whole, feminist leaders have been undisturbed by the obvious parallels between Solanas’s textual justification of the murder of men and her actual shootings of men. </div><div><br /></div><div>The then-president of the National Organization of Women’s New York chapter championed Solanas at the time of her crimes as a symbol of women’s justified rage and enlisted a prominent attorney to handle her defense. One of Andy Warhol’s film stars wrote a memoir (Famous for 15 Minutes: My Years with Andy Warhol) in which she praised Solanas as a visionary, saying “For in the beginning, beyond her overheated rhetoric, she had a truly revolutionary vision of a better world run by and for the benefit of women.” </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9slr05PbOAIuy3TFzBMqQf1y1RT7y4PvwB7mT2VzN8CAcUgPaTNlW8cynfcygcZhJgo2-Umg_3vZnelqGNb6FIYycyARjFhpYua989_TC5kZlCGAi-J8nkQ6s6oolEHfyrSV519NPECh4tTaz80uDHtbM1fghmmC7GUKvDG7M9dgu68awFpaoWepeig/s422/FF2-035%20p08%20Avital%20Ronel_.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="422" data-original-width="410" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9slr05PbOAIuy3TFzBMqQf1y1RT7y4PvwB7mT2VzN8CAcUgPaTNlW8cynfcygcZhJgo2-Umg_3vZnelqGNb6FIYycyARjFhpYua989_TC5kZlCGAi-J8nkQ6s6oolEHfyrSV519NPECh4tTaz80uDHtbM1fghmmC7GUKvDG7M9dgu68awFpaoWepeig/w194-h200/FF2-035%20p08%20Avital%20Ronel_.png" width="194" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Avital Ronell</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>The SCUM Manifesto has been taught in women’s studies courses and reprinted by a boutique press in 2004 with a lengthy, bombastic introduction by postmodernist professor Avital Ronell, who praised the book’s prescience, stating of Solanas that “Maybe she was put here to speak the unspeakable or, less dramatically, to sound the wake-up call […] to encourage the dialectics of female empowerment” (24).</div><div><br /></div><div>In 2014, Breanna Fahs published an admiring biography that cast Solanas as both abused innocent and resistance warrior. Fahs records an exchange between Solanas and a friend Jeremiah Newton, who asked her if her manifesto was to be taken literally. “I don’t want to kill all men,” she had allegedly replied “I think males should be neutered or castrated so they can’t mess up any more lives.” </div><div> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIEoKYO7ExirTNLHGK74ahyozRLH3GWgQvNX0LAEJwVTUghw6KskPEfOfaSjkqMqKLLyXdy1g_lCcgwli9VpuSKe--C8zGwyO63muRbA11Rs_MHb2V5J5EJwPZ0ENk2BVyEj5fjjjVgScueH2H3vryYfkylgmnoU4XTbc6_B7Zz9mQ8k0ihJb4jBoREg/s2036/FF2-035%20p09.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2036" data-original-width="1400" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIEoKYO7ExirTNLHGK74ahyozRLH3GWgQvNX0LAEJwVTUghw6KskPEfOfaSjkqMqKLLyXdy1g_lCcgwli9VpuSKe--C8zGwyO63muRbA11Rs_MHb2V5J5EJwPZ0ENk2BVyEj5fjjjVgScueH2H3vryYfkylgmnoU4XTbc6_B7Zz9mQ8k0ihJb4jBoREg/w138-h200/FF2-035%20p09.png" width="138" /></a></div></div><div>In 2020, a celebratory article calling Solanas “an important LBGTQ figure,” was published in The New York Times as part of a series called Overlooked, about “remarkable” people whose deaths had not been reported in The Times. The article noted her “daring arguments in SCUM Manifesto, her case for a world without men” and seemed to regret that the attack on Warhol had come to “define her life.” </div><div><br /></div><div>It’s impossible to imagine the online manifesto of Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in Isla Vista, being read in university classrooms and published with a glowing introduction by a super-star academic.</div><div><br /></div><div>But Solanas is no one-off. A number of feminist academics have put forward their own recommendations for male annihilation, perhaps the most significant being Gender Studies Professor Sally Miller Gearhart, widely beloved lesbian feminist who spent much of her writing life imagining all-women communities, and eventually founding such a community in Northern California in the Redwood forest area. Unlike Solanas, Gearhart was never diagnosed with a mental illness or committed to an institution for violence, but her utopian faith in the moral superiority of women is equally alarming, perhaps more so given how calmly she proposed her eugenics program and how little condemnation it elicited. Outside of a few marginalized MRAs, most people don’t seem to know much about it. </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmfWGA6ytJEWVPh-aU0FJbelU6cIBgOBeoEtl4pUTvIs2FmPume-gVq1-B4wMdUXqFQAH6zVc_nqjPgj52PC_-YcJjEF9_1PIT35K6a1xRZnJh3S6bDz9eVb05MnNWMn3jISQ8AxL5QCNItdyvFCciEULo0SabrhPzzQszjG3jyxKea4dvur4f4ANeNw/s2080/FF2-035%20p10%20Sally%20Miller%20Gearhart_.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2080" data-original-width="1623" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmfWGA6ytJEWVPh-aU0FJbelU6cIBgOBeoEtl4pUTvIs2FmPume-gVq1-B4wMdUXqFQAH6zVc_nqjPgj52PC_-YcJjEF9_1PIT35K6a1xRZnJh3S6bDz9eVb05MnNWMn3jISQ8AxL5QCNItdyvFCciEULo0SabrhPzzQszjG3jyxKea4dvur4f4ANeNw/w156-h200/FF2-035%20p10%20Sally%20Miller%20Gearhart_.png" width="156" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sally Miller Gearhart</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>Published in a 1982 book called Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence, Gearhart’s essay is entitled “The Future—If There Is One—Is Female.” In it, Gearhart declares that the female must be acknowledged “as primary, as the source of all life” (272), superior to the male and able to exist without the male (272). </div><div><br /></div><div>As the superior sex, women should, Gearhart alleged, have absolute power over all aspects of reproduction, including over whether babies will be carried to term and what sex the babies will be. “Restore to each woman the inalienable right to say what shall become of any fertilized egg and to control absolutely the number of children she wishes to emerge from her body” (276-77). Gearhart admitted that this would mean an actual disempowerment of men, but that was a simple necessity not to be dwelt upon with any regret. “Make non-existent any man’s say so in the process of human reproduction.” </div><div><br /></div><div>Because men were vicious, especially in groups, according to Gearhart, the future would have to be one in which male numbers would be strictly regulated: “The ratio of men to women must be radically reduced so that men approximate only ten percent of the total population.” This would be done not through violence, Gearhart assured her readers, but gradually, through women’s reproductive choices and through new reproductive technologies such as ovular merging, a reproductive process that produces only girls. Gearhart also considered that male reduction could be achieved through infanticide, but confessed to finding that “distasteful” (282).</div><div><br /></div><div>She had thought about an even further reduction, but decided against it. “Some have asked, given the overwhelming association of men with violence, why the reduction to ten percent only” (p. 281). In other words, why not a total elimination? Gearhart confessed that she had seriously considered this question but determined that there were a few good men; that some women enjoyed sexual intercourse as a means of reproduction, and that her thesis might possibly be wrong, in which case men would have been eliminated for nothing. </div><div><br /></div><div>In her last two paragraphs, Gearhart expressed some awareness, if only through denial, of the illogicality and immorality of what she was advocating—but denied there was anything violent or victimizing in her proposal, or even that it was a case of women “imposing their morality or their values upon men” (p. 283). Not at all. “We are talking of something that once existed [i.e. female power] and that has been deliberately and with full malice held down and controlled by means so violent that no nonaggressive entity could hope to resist” (p. 283). Women’s power was “life affirming,” she said, even as she fantasized about eliminating most men from the earth. The “real violence,” she said, lay in the “minute-by-minute, day-by-day suppression of the very force that gives us all life. A female future means the challenge to and the obliteration of that violence” (p. 284). In other words, opposing conceptual violence with actual extermination was the route to peace.</div><div><br /></div><div>Gearhart ended with a call to men to aid women in bringing about this future. There must be “a movement of men who not only cease to hold down women but who earnestly lend their tremendous male power to the hastening of the female future. We can count on it: it will be for us all the most crucial, the most profound act that women and men have ever undertaken together” (p. 284). </div><div><br /></div><div>Indeed, it would be a profound act for men to collaborate with women to decrease the male population to 10% of humanity, and perhaps there are some numbers of women—and men too—who agree with Gearhart that it would usher in peace and plenty. </div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVEqctY0NZ4GhXZo02bfRt-NknR-NcuzblRWtCU60J2rsadn5Dtzg2wDkBlBQztooJksJ0nLAx7w6riCLFP8Ydvi1jd6aK4UimGtBOrrOyIrNkehVAVJHimgK-ZzU-VOdyxykkqHIZuWixnYGVOD0bWYsoslQf1f8wzChStG2-vPu1-lMnVdPooAbZww/s1280/FF2-035%20Mary%20Daly%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="966" data-original-width="1280" height="303" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVEqctY0NZ4GhXZo02bfRt-NknR-NcuzblRWtCU60J2rsadn5Dtzg2wDkBlBQztooJksJ0nLAx7w6riCLFP8Ydvi1jd6aK4UimGtBOrrOyIrNkehVAVJHimgK-ZzU-VOdyxykkqHIZuWixnYGVOD0bWYsoslQf1f8wzChStG2-vPu1-lMnVdPooAbZww/w400-h303/FF2-035%20Mary%20Daly%20b.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mary Daly</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>Certainly theology and women’s studies professor Mary Daly, of Boston College, gave the idea her endorsement when, asked about Gearhart’s proposal in an interview for What is Enlightenment magazine, she responded “I think it’s not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.” She concluded, perhaps with a wry chuckle, that “People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.” </div><div><br /></div><div>We can be thankful, I suppose, that some feminist leaders were not afraid to say what they believed, and we can note the general agreement with Professors Gearhart and Daly in the lack of denunciation of their ideas. Upon Gearhart’s death, she was eulogized in highly positive terms with nary a mention of her eugenics proposal.</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps it is possible to find, somewhere on the internet, a lone voice or two advocating the random killing of women, or the near-elimination of the female sex. I doubt it.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, it is surely impossible to imagine a group of thought leaders in our society not only tolerating but in many cases actively promoting and praising the idea of femicide—for the good of the earth. </div><div><br /></div><div>Only the proposed killing of men is tolerated and praised. When confronted with the evidence, feminist advocates are disbelieving, defensive, and dismissive—ultimately annoyed, even outraged, to have the extremist tenets of their professed ideology read back to them. But their belief in their own righteousness is unshaken. 21st century feminism remains the most popular hate cult in the world. </div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div><br /></div> Janice Fiamengo<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-71035093152730720942023-05-08T09:47:00.001-04:002023-05-08T09:47:25.870-04:00Germaine Greer Approved of Sex with Boys - Janice Fiamengo<div>Decades of feminist theorizing have stressed the dark side of male sexual desire, its violence, its alleged objectification of women, and its alleged infliction of indignities. When Germaine Greer turned her attention to female sexuality, in a book about female pederasty, or sex with boys, she was unashamedly celebratory. </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2uwzS6a0-F2PECkG6LJmA7HvGtuPPmIYaaDVsF_7_jnAUmiVUJ2mVxH0ZhxAcj93adfukqc8clCGh5t8__--ZsDgMEdGGHTGJ7eiUbjXu058ZACL5Kao1Lwe7kYLylz2QNmyXCqiaiRqeJkNLxMelqBzUg3QBpOQOU6ehhIMCfmN3OLdn2Z723xPYAw/s859/FF2-034%20Germaine%20Greer%2001b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="575" data-original-width="859" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2uwzS6a0-F2PECkG6LJmA7HvGtuPPmIYaaDVsF_7_jnAUmiVUJ2mVxH0ZhxAcj93adfukqc8clCGh5t8__--ZsDgMEdGGHTGJ7eiUbjXu058ZACL5Kao1Lwe7kYLylz2QNmyXCqiaiRqeJkNLxMelqBzUg3QBpOQOU6ehhIMCfmN3OLdn2Z723xPYAw/w200-h134/FF2-034%20Germaine%20Greer%2001b.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Germaine Greer</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>In 2003, well-known Australian feminist Germaine Greer published The Beautiful Boy, a picture book with commentary that had as one of its stated purposes to encourage women to reclaim their pleasure in looking at boys’ naked bodies. The book also included approving commentary about sexual relationships between adult women and pubescent boys. </div><div><br /></div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div>Greer’s argument concerning representations of nude boys was that while it was generally acknowledged that young women’s bodies are beautiful, and that men enjoy looking at them, almost no one acknowledges the fact of male beauty. Greer claimed that such beauty was found not in mature men but almost exclusively in boys, and her book documents and encourages the sexualizing of boys’ bodies. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjBukwi1tVJuU_UY2StzUWC-digF2fuaxJ06cbaHWp5NxIqyKEFrQNPeF0exdEGUrVXZC1Sea7wj5Hei3efBh_HoS4jR29z9o1Yv5yDE4iahjV9ECVSzFRmnwew1nuDnRLU5oFM4Pcl2LuNSmgZk1YmcnvS7pgzgUemHN3gaZrEIZnaiqAEVUvVacyYQ/s2717/FF2-034%20Beautiful%20Boy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2717" data-original-width="2100" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjBukwi1tVJuU_UY2StzUWC-digF2fuaxJ06cbaHWp5NxIqyKEFrQNPeF0exdEGUrVXZC1Sea7wj5Hei3efBh_HoS4jR29z9o1Yv5yDE4iahjV9ECVSzFRmnwew1nuDnRLU5oFM4Pcl2LuNSmgZk1YmcnvS7pgzgUemHN3gaZrEIZnaiqAEVUvVacyYQ/w154-h200/FF2-034%20Beautiful%20Boy.jpg" width="154" /></a></div><br /><div>She moved quickly in the book to specify the exact age and stage of adolescence that represented the height of male beauty, acknowledging that “This window of opportunity is not only narrow, it is mostly illegal.” Claiming without any evidence or argument that mature men are not beautiful, Greer alleged that a boy is most attractive when young: “He has to be old enough to be capable of sexual response but not yet old enough to shave.” </div><div><br /></div><div>And she continued enthusiastically: “The male human is beautiful when his cheeks are still smooth, his body hairless, his head full-maned, his eyes clear, his manner shy and his belly flat” (p. 7). She was 64 years old when she published the book and was obviously expressing her own personal preferences. </div><div><br /></div><div>Greer’s picture book argued a part-art-historical and part-ideological thesis, seeking to demonstrate, through numerous representations of classical Greek and Roman statuary as well as Renaissance and later paintings by European masters, that until a few hundred years ago, artists were well aware of the aesthetic and erotic power of the boy nude. Furthermore, she said, “Women too have known it and know it still [i.e. that boys are beautiful]. Girls and grandmothers are both susceptible to the short-lived charm of boys, women who are looking for a father for their children less so” (p. 7).</div><div><br /></div><div>The boy nude was commonplace in art to embody masculine values, and it was only when “As women joined the viewing public […] toward the end of the eighteenth century, both masculinity and sensuality drained away from depictions of the male nude” (p. 10). “Part of the purpose this book,” she wrote, “is to advance women’s reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure. If we but lift our eyes to the beautiful images of young men that stand all about us, there is a world of complex and civilized pleasure to be had” (p. 11). </div><div><br /></div><div>How nice for women to indulge their “complex and civilized pleasure.” One wonders whether men have a right to similar visual pleasures. Do men’s desires also deserve to be celebrated? In the typically doubled-standards of feminist proselytizing, Greer never does say. Perhaps she believed that men’s pleasures are so well entrenched in the culture as to be not worth defending. </div><div><br /></div><div>Greer’s book is emphatically about women as viewers, women as desiring subjects, and although she writes with compassion and awareness of the vulnerabilities of boys and their lives throughout history, her focus is on the liberatory potential of female desire. </div><div><br /></div><div>She writes approvingly of sexual relationships as depicted in literature between boys of 15 and women twice their age. Speaking of one example, she says, “If there is an element of child abuse in [the woman’s] seduction of the boy, it is that no love he ever experienced afterward could match either the comfort or the intensity of this relationship, in which the boy was never in control but so quick to regain his erection that it didn’t matter” (p. 77). Greer pours out scorn on 21st century moralizers who see sex between adolescent boys and older women as abuse, echoing Freudian disciple and psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in asking of such relationships, “Who is seducing whom?” In other words, Greer, like Klein, assumes that in such a scenario, the boy is at least as responsible for seduction as the woman, an allegation, it hardly needs to be said, that would not be possible to be made about a young girl allegedly seducing a mature man. </div><div><br /></div><div>Germaine Greer is a prolific author who has always been an eccentric, controversial feminist, a campaigner for sexual liberation rather than for women’s rights, a belligerent contrarian who seems to enjoy saying outrageous things, and a renegade who admitted to not liking women very much.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRLnvVO9nZEYPIMVN5jfBhV0RWnF3rjIrIfLT5aGIQtQAk1U2gMxTX-AWR__JGhYrstK4YC-oCRFCyr3CC_Eyfk0LPbMguRgzsPwuhRrB_EYvLobgVwVDicfj3f8G5TwM_KC6zdAKHuVgvGUBh4XvQstBgehMWt_ul8n-ycqejr8gETyLcyk1beCSz0g/s1832/FF2-034%20p07.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1832" data-original-width="1000" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRLnvVO9nZEYPIMVN5jfBhV0RWnF3rjIrIfLT5aGIQtQAk1U2gMxTX-AWR__JGhYrstK4YC-oCRFCyr3CC_Eyfk0LPbMguRgzsPwuhRrB_EYvLobgVwVDicfj3f8G5TwM_KC6zdAKHuVgvGUBh4XvQstBgehMWt_ul8n-ycqejr8gETyLcyk1beCSz0g/w109-h200/FF2-034%20p07.png" width="109" /></a></div>Her major book, The Female Eunuch, published in 1970 during the heyday of the Second Wave of feminism, has sold millions of copies and been translated into dozens of languages. </div><div><br /></div><div>For having written that book, Greer was called the “Saucy feminist that even men like,” and her argument in The Female Eunuch has been described, rather disapprovingly, as libertarian rather than revolutionary in encouraging women to look inside themselves to discover who they are rather than agitating as a collective for specific social rights. </div><div><br /></div><div>One feminist review of The Female Eunuch castigated Greer for daring to blame women for much of their own misery, and lamented what she saw as the “lack of ‘sisterhood’” Greer showed. </div><div><br /></div><div>Now in her early 80s, Greer remains a lightning rod for criticism, most recently because of her outspoken refusal to recognize trans women as women. </div><div><br /></div><div>Greer’s unorthodoxy is evident in The Beautiful Boy, which never claims that boys are privileged, never laments that boys have an easier time of it than girls, as we have too often seen amongst feminist ideologues. </div><div><br /></div><div>While prone to many sweeping assertions of the type inevitably open to criticism by specialists, she is always at least aware of the humanity of boys, and certainly of the hardships and cruel treatment boys have had to endure through history. In that sense, this is not a particularly feminist book, and it even may be said to be a remarkable book for a feminist woman to have written, one that sees boys as fully human, and not as little oppressors in waiting.</div><div><br /></div><div>Be that as it may, Greer’s rampant sexualizing of boys, which is overt and unapologetic throughout, makes for uneasy reading and remains quite shocking even twenty years after the book’s first publication. Greer is especially interested in representations of boys as “passive love objects,” which is the title of her fifth chapter. Boys who are immobilized and passive in sleep are the perfect erotic objects, she asserts, open to the woman’s desiring contemplation and advances. She describes the ideal scene as follows:</div><div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHccjNlsttZZBepTo-DtSm5x_U2DBUAw5pZgXKozBPDSz3jYtUB-TjnpUkXXUaynsMfiNotSDXT4MVSCseVOjqbVrNGL6HJVMKQXXqol16VUTzB3nT-q4nCl__3v-15bBanHaf87YICqWLPGk18kbwWZFRO3MKHUVhxtSCc3xC0VcdgQcbuD84eNK83g/s1200/FF2-034%20p11.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="479" data-original-width="1200" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHccjNlsttZZBepTo-DtSm5x_U2DBUAw5pZgXKozBPDSz3jYtUB-TjnpUkXXUaynsMfiNotSDXT4MVSCseVOjqbVrNGL6HJVMKQXXqol16VUTzB3nT-q4nCl__3v-15bBanHaf87YICqWLPGk18kbwWZFRO3MKHUVhxtSCc3xC0VcdgQcbuD84eNK83g/w400-h160/FF2-034%20p11.png" width="400" /></a></div></div><div><br /></div><div>“As he sleeps, amorous eyes may feast upon his beauty; when those eyes belong to a woman, she is for once powerful and dominant, free to feed her own desire as slowly and deeply as she wishes, building her own excitement and deliciously delaying any consummation, as mother-like she takes pains not to wake the sleeping beauty” (p. 105). </div><div><br /></div><div>What is striking here, as throughout the book, is the entirely positive valence that words like desire, power, and even dominance assume when their reference is to a woman sexually desiring—and fondling, it seems—a sleeping boy. No apology is made for the emphasis on the boy’s passivity and powerlessness. Greer does not pause even for a moment to worry over the lack of consent clearly implied in the older woman’s taking of pleasure with a sleeping or only half-awake boy. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaStCjKIU2XB5qb_UEEh8DCm6R7FNFsS4ngJLOrxgWwp7EugpXQdTVyw81g_fyDVXeQILMDYi2wpfT45v8iHtt3vh4ELucHxzEgsMSbsfgvYpHpkVoIss_ILPuI-PZyXyBUR0n4nAMAZJau8hvTj7H16AM-K_J52oQZOW7hslWbKoANecd50d7CaCsjQ/s400/FF2-034%20p12.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="268" data-original-width="400" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaStCjKIU2XB5qb_UEEh8DCm6R7FNFsS4ngJLOrxgWwp7EugpXQdTVyw81g_fyDVXeQILMDYi2wpfT45v8iHtt3vh4ELucHxzEgsMSbsfgvYpHpkVoIss_ILPuI-PZyXyBUR0n4nAMAZJau8hvTj7H16AM-K_J52oQZOW7hslWbKoANecd50d7CaCsjQ/w400-h268/FF2-034%20p12.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />And in this emphasis, Greer is squarely part of the feminist tradition. Female sexuality is almost invariably represented by feminists as a force for good or at least incapable of causing harm. For Greer in particular it is pure, motherly, and uplifting, both for the female subject who experiences desire and for the object of the desire. The boy’s consent, his agency—all seem quite irrelevant. All of the negative assumptions that attach as a matter of course to male sexuality are replaced in the woman by idealizations of motherliness, play, and nurturing. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQMTeL6nYgJvdvvFSzB7OdrDe1HXiavR_R-bJAJPzlhKdMcpH691dwrvsCzkGFVpxNF9ML0HnIaMPzgJ6FkNUSi9GFxVAp3anMsOa1u3zEgEIkmK7ZeXZp_EofvYEX0DoVigTEIoj2oMVhWRmvhd2ss6woyHYZqjKHQfOrS5IGJDUPvy1YnC48vHRKLg/s803/FF2-034%20p06%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="803" data-original-width="615" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQMTeL6nYgJvdvvFSzB7OdrDe1HXiavR_R-bJAJPzlhKdMcpH691dwrvsCzkGFVpxNF9ML0HnIaMPzgJ6FkNUSi9GFxVAp3anMsOa1u3zEgEIkmK7ZeXZp_EofvYEX0DoVigTEIoj2oMVhWRmvhd2ss6woyHYZqjKHQfOrS5IGJDUPvy1YnC48vHRKLg/w153-h200/FF2-034%20p06%20b.png" width="153" /></a></div>On the few occasions that female sexual aggression is depicted negatively in artistic renderings, Greer sees it as evidence of a “deep-seated fear of the sexual power of the mother” rather than of any legitimate moral strictures. For example, Greer comments on the story of Potiphar’s wife in the Book of Genesis in the Bible. In that story, Joseph was falsely accused of rape by his employer’s wife after she made sexual advances and he rejected them. Greer never considers the story as a depiction of a common or even potential reality; she sees it as an expression of patriarchal fear and hatred of feminine sexuality: a predictably and boringly feminist interpretation. </div><div><br /></div><div>Throughout the book, she single-mindedly celebrates what she calls the “age-old collaboration between mature women and boys in search of sexual enlightenment” (p. 125) and refuses to consider that any such arrangement, in any context, could be harmful. It is, of course, impossible to imagine anyone discussing the obverse—older men and pubescent girls—in such unvaryingly positive terms. </div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyqSYw-8KJERt5VNcA-XDV1kq6NFNgW5G94sDVYVNvn72KhODmIbKUOlfR0S9DH9WDIoinGvnk4DLXYpxBMnbqa9oqsLE1bF9pnW0NaALRdJqYtFn4I3_OGjbyey-U7P5rbTj0P9hdqJggTci4KCBb6WRJUmC2JezGcCl-oc5DEa_O-3xJkosxvLiLeA/s1130/FF2-034%20p14%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="770" data-original-width="1130" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyqSYw-8KJERt5VNcA-XDV1kq6NFNgW5G94sDVYVNvn72KhODmIbKUOlfR0S9DH9WDIoinGvnk4DLXYpxBMnbqa9oqsLE1bF9pnW0NaALRdJqYtFn4I3_OGjbyey-U7P5rbTj0P9hdqJggTci4KCBb6WRJUmC2JezGcCl-oc5DEa_O-3xJkosxvLiLeA/w400-h272/FF2-034%20p14%20b.png" width="400" /></a></div><div><br /></div>As noted earlier, Greer’s book seems a thinly disguised celebration of the author’s own erotic proclivities, a defiant confession of frank lasciviousness. I like THAT, she is proclaiming to readers of the book, and encouraging other women to do the same. Though the book was criticized for its inclusion of photographs of naked boys—one of whom, appearing on the cover of the British edition of the book, said he had never given permission for the photograph’s use—in general, Greer escaped the howls of public outrage and likely criminal charges that would have befallen any man who had made a picture book about sexually desirable under-age girls, including actual pictures of naked girls. </div><div><br /></div><div>Our society is in general far more forgiving of female sexual transgression than of male. It is not unusual for female teachers to be caught sexually assaulting their young male charges and for the incident to be treated with leniency, sometimes even with the suggestion that the boy has had a fortunate, or at least not damaging, sexual introduction. There was a case in Louisiana some years ago, for example, in which Shelley Dufresne, who had had a month-long sexual interaction with a boy of 16 at her school, avoided prison time by taking a plea deal that replaced the original charge of “carnal knowledge of a juvenile” with the lesser charge of “obscenity.” She was 32 years old at the time she accepted the plea deal. This is the climate of tolerance within which Greer was writing. In her celebration of adult women having sex with underage boys, Greer’s book confirms and extends a cultural pattern in which women are allowed a degree of sexual license that men are never offered. </div><br /><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8aiUWHng0kx6eROp0WJAMQJEv9b3duglxaNSBiVKmRgodbgp8_RUh7lqVns1vXF_HzEvSQNdS7pwzQ2e-ngDMd2zwt3_QMRPjhXawpHtHsoPSj_2y67lf4Q8q-D4_vTgSYHJJyMPnEFoa1rWdBLOHj3jTHhL0qUIjY-nSpQd2k9QgfVkp7d_Uzakbsg/s400/FF2-034%20p13.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="264" data-original-width="400" height="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8aiUWHng0kx6eROp0WJAMQJEv9b3duglxaNSBiVKmRgodbgp8_RUh7lqVns1vXF_HzEvSQNdS7pwzQ2e-ngDMd2zwt3_QMRPjhXawpHtHsoPSj_2y67lf4Q8q-D4_vTgSYHJJyMPnEFoa1rWdBLOHj3jTHhL0qUIjY-nSpQd2k9QgfVkp7d_Uzakbsg/w400-h264/FF2-034%20p13.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />In that sense, The Beautiful Boy is not exactly the bold and pathbreaking book that Greer clearly thought it was, though it does seem to honestly, and perhaps courageously, express Greer’s own views. </div><div><br /></div><div>Greer’s failure to interrogate the assumption of female innocence—or even to admit that it exists—makes her book far less interesting than it might have been; and our society’s continuing failure to recognize women’s full humanity, including the female capacity for exploitation, reckless indifference, and everyday narcissism, remains a source of gendered inequality that most feminists are happy to accept. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> Janice Fiamengo</div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-20194564348432664072023-05-08T09:23:00.001-04:002023-05-08T09:23:32.573-04:00Andrea Dworkin, Feminist Fury Personified - Janice Fiamengo<div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMKNEwcXEonnQwn9Tow_zC1hy1PCJ9dN2OgG0cvBvJv8fNkgsS1fmun32joA0XpYiIiJQVwg3FpG5MfIOIJycSEK1V0G9NV_DWZt73uypuYHh3gNCtBXupntxw8aJADVGfrF0RQKo5jwBvDU7ci2Fy1DSSQyVm2zBZeq1WVroEP-7fIdWfwts0EXPtYA/s2035/FF2-033%20Dworkin.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2035" data-original-width="1339" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMKNEwcXEonnQwn9Tow_zC1hy1PCJ9dN2OgG0cvBvJv8fNkgsS1fmun32joA0XpYiIiJQVwg3FpG5MfIOIJycSEK1V0G9NV_DWZt73uypuYHh3gNCtBXupntxw8aJADVGfrF0RQKo5jwBvDU7ci2Fy1DSSQyVm2zBZeq1WVroEP-7fIdWfwts0EXPtYA/w132-h200/FF2-033%20Dworkin.png" width="132" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Andrea Dworkin</td></tr></tbody></table>Andrea Dworkin was feminism’s most brilliant and deranged propagandist, and the failure of most feminist leaders to disavow her claims offers conclusive proof that feminism is a hate movement.</div><div><br /></div><div>Most people are at least familiar with Andrea Dworkin as feminist icon, with her massive physical bulk, her impassioned rhetoric, and her trademark lesbian-identified overalls. Fewer have read her books. In their time, the books were considered ground-breaking and even true. Feminist author Ariel Levy has called Dworkin a “savior goddess” and the “evangelical, untouchable preacher for the oppressed” (Intercourse, xix). Today Dworkin’s unhinged hatred of men seems bombastic and disingenuous. Yet her impact on North American feminist culture is undeniable. </div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div>No feminist did more to outline and consolidate the modern feminist understanding of sex than Dworkin (1946-2005), who wrote on the subject obsessively and with unparalleled fervid authority in books with titles such as Woman Hating (1974). Like other radical feminists, Dworkin fulminated against rape, pornography, and prostitution—joining forces in the early 1980s with law professor Catharine MacKinnon to draft anti-pornography legislation—but her special focus was the degradation for women of sex itself, everyday sex, the commonly accepted, normalized indignity that men allegedly inflict on women. Sex, she believed, embodied nothing less than male hatred. “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women” (p. 175). This is the thesis of her most representative book Intercourse, published in 1987 when Dworkin was 41 years old.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4aHNmNOW3qYISurSYtt1zol2ABh2jfnA8ov3NGLAjtvU07fVcxJC3ZmYDqAWUhgiYL8p8MWSWL4HsMK0d4vBXv4fecZ-QU_9qQ35P8pahF_QazK7i3ZXVaPc8LMxTouehXfs2asMXyu7726XAWV11GzL8milJO5BqmNnmXkdszekFjVDQOhCLUT9eyw/s499/FF2-033%20p03.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="331" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4aHNmNOW3qYISurSYtt1zol2ABh2jfnA8ov3NGLAjtvU07fVcxJC3ZmYDqAWUhgiYL8p8MWSWL4HsMK0d4vBXv4fecZ-QU_9qQ35P8pahF_QazK7i3ZXVaPc8LMxTouehXfs2asMXyu7726XAWV11GzL8milJO5BqmNnmXkdszekFjVDQOhCLUT9eyw/w133-h200/FF2-033%20p03.png" width="133" /></a></div>Intercourse set out to illuminate, through select readings of literary texts, what Dworkin believed to be the constant of male culture, the “hatred of women, unexplained, undiagnosed, mostly unacknowledged, that pervades sexual practice and sexual passion” (175-76). The phrase she most often used in the book to refer to intercourse was “the fuck,” meant to signify the dehumanization that normal intercourse supposedly involved. Dworkin nominated herself the expert on male contempt for women because she had been, as she claimed, its victim. “Specifically, am I saying that I know more than men about fucking?” she asked defiantly in the Preface to the book, and answered, “Yes, I am. Not just different: more and better, deeper and wider, the way anyone used knows the user” (xxxi).</div><div><br /></div><div>Though she also claimed in her combative Preface that the book “does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape” (xxxii)—she does, as I will show, essentially say that, if not in quite those words. As she asserted only a page after the denial, “Intercourse [the book] conveys […] what it means that men—and now boys—feel entitled to come into the privacy of a woman’s body in a context of inequality” (xxxiv). In another segment, she clarified that most, even the vast majority of, men are sexually abusive. Men objected to feminist critique of pornography and prostitution because, she alleged, “[…] so many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid,” that “without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste” (p. 61). Men who objected to her arguments about the omnipresence of exploitation were themselves abusers who didn’t like the thought of their exploitation being curtailed. </div><div><br /></div><div>This was Dworkin: bombastic, hyperbolic, incandescent with a rage that did not excuse her smearing of all men even if her accounts of sexual abuse at men’s hands were true and unadorned. Late in life, Dworkin made bizarre allegations about having been raped in a Paris hotel room that even her most devoted admirers found very difficult to believe. Ultimately, no one knows the truth of Dworkin’s many alleged violations, which were the basis for all she wrote. </div><div><br /></div><div>Dworkin said she had been molested or raped at around 9 years of age, later abused by New York City prison doctors at age 18 after her arrest during a Vietnam War protest, and then badly beaten many times by a man she had married in Amsterdam in the early 1970s. </div><div><br /></div><div>Though she escaped this man and carried on a life of writing and advocacy in the United States, during which time she became closely associated with feminist leaders such as Susan Brownmiller, Gloria Steinem, and Catharine MacKinnon, Dworkin’s feminist advocacy was always distinguished from these other leaders by its unmitigated, condemnation of men. </div><div><br /></div><div>And to this day, the vast majority of feminist leaders are undisturbed by Dworkin’s bigotry, justifying it as understandable, even necessary and helpful. “People who […] raised their eyebrows at her supposed extremism or her intransigence or her fire took secret glee from that,” Robin Morgan stated, adding that, like Malcolm X, Dworkin’s was “the militant voice, […] the voice that would dare say what nobody else was saying . . . and it can’t help but say it because it is speaking out of such incredible personal pain” (qtd in Levy, pp. xix-xx). That Dworkin had pain seems undeniable—she was eating to fill some kind of emotional void—but whether its sources were as she claimed has never been ascertained.</div><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8gYkF6z3EIPsmYoH6cTqErGvugJ7ip6isJVJB_1QPgNqCtL2JvXRLdRra_DtnrihXKIH65aNJ6Qu8BeMrx53314wKggF9Qg2jfQPPgyuzPI8dnj_KFgCTkwNI9ap59XkuI8-5JA-_vmh6YeAPSrZ58GubpDv770S-PgD2pnOsBJS471_O917_EqbEcg/s800/FF2-033%20p06%20John%20Stoltenberg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="703" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8gYkF6z3EIPsmYoH6cTqErGvugJ7ip6isJVJB_1QPgNqCtL2JvXRLdRra_DtnrihXKIH65aNJ6Qu8BeMrx53314wKggF9Qg2jfQPPgyuzPI8dnj_KFgCTkwNI9ap59XkuI8-5JA-_vmh6YeAPSrZ58GubpDv770S-PgD2pnOsBJS471_O917_EqbEcg/w176-h200/FF2-033%20p06%20John%20Stoltenberg.png" width="176" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Stoltenberg</td></tr></tbody></table>Many of her close friends and admirers were surprised to discover after her death, in 2005, that for 30 years, she had lived with and eventually married, a man, John Stoltenberg. Stoltenberg claimed that Dworkin’s gender radicalism saved his life and allowed him to be the man he didn’t want to be. He published a book in 1989 called Refusing to Be a Man, which he dedicated to Dworkin; she often spoke of herself as a lesbian. </div><div><br /></div><div>As an antipornography activist, Stoltenberg used to offer college workshops in which he would invite men to assume the positions in which women were photographed for pornography in order to make them feel the women’s humiliation (xxiii). The very fact of Stoltenberg’s masculinity-denying adoration for his uncompromising wife undermines much of what Dworkin claimed in her writings about the abusive nature of men, but that hasn’t diminished her reputation as a radical truth-teller with her followers. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjngm1TdL_eWiCH0p75vTbpfW7BwELu73W974z8A20Wq9e9Rt4zcFBMlBslFUbhn5LMGTxSseBmdJnKEXWsu-WmjuChFB_-rFNti53ZCuO_-IUNmJMIbUC-A1mPbj7ShGs62r7LOk3eUsMKyOTdVcnKaH1S5HsDGliTfOcW3IgUvjUd5ViPtPD21SUshQ/s912/FF2-033%20p07.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="912" data-original-width="608" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjngm1TdL_eWiCH0p75vTbpfW7BwELu73W974z8A20Wq9e9Rt4zcFBMlBslFUbhn5LMGTxSseBmdJnKEXWsu-WmjuChFB_-rFNti53ZCuO_-IUNmJMIbUC-A1mPbj7ShGs62r7LOk3eUsMKyOTdVcnKaH1S5HsDGliTfOcW3IgUvjUd5ViPtPD21SUshQ/w133-h200/FF2-033%20p07.png" width="133" /></a></div>In 2006, Ariel Levy claimed in the Foreword to the reissue of Intercourse that “Dworkin’s profound and unique legacy was to examine the meaning of the act most of us take to be fundamental to sex […]” and hedged that, “If you disagree with her answers, you may still find yourself indebted to her for helping you discover your own” (xv). This is Levy’s attempt to distance herself from Dworkin’s despicable anti-male generalizations while still praising the author’s alleged insights. But Dworkin never examined anything per se: she pontificated, judged, and damned from her self-chosen pulpit as the excoriating prophet of male sin, and her encouragement to thousands of other women to hate with equal passion remains her destructive legacy, one that is as unhelpful as it is patently untrue.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the book Intercourse, Dworkin broke every rule of responsible literary criticism and cultural analysis, reading works of literature as if they directly reflected the author’s mind; if the author described a character who hated women, that must mean that the author hated women and endorsed such hatred. But if some of the works seemed to have pro-woman sympathies, that didn’t complicate Dworkin’s argument. From the Dworkin point of view, a male author who wrote critically of women was a misogynist, while a male author who wrote critically of men was merely a realist—though likely a misogynist too. Women were never admitted to be capable of sadism, cruelty, indifference to suffering, or narcissism. “Women have a vision of love that includes men as human too” (p. 162). Men had only the choice they seemed unwilling to make: “When will they choose not to despise us?” (p. 177), she asked. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj69ApgJdBpvh2f_3XuzkiaJEpEfAvhcItzAXg_txz4VcgI7WGbQ080VhLZg1MUGDvfyoSP7ET0VipwHheea3gPCuczUcJ0W5GxFdxwRTcH1MVYsfOoBC-q2qt1QeDf0eCirvUd5QVxKp2vxwiNtA8xbNyC3s1jYxTz5vNppRUB6-BsF5v1Tl3fIUTBFw/s1000/FF2-033%20p09.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="666" data-original-width="1000" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj69ApgJdBpvh2f_3XuzkiaJEpEfAvhcItzAXg_txz4VcgI7WGbQ080VhLZg1MUGDvfyoSP7ET0VipwHheea3gPCuczUcJ0W5GxFdxwRTcH1MVYsfOoBC-q2qt1QeDf0eCirvUd5QVxKp2vxwiNtA8xbNyC3s1jYxTz5vNppRUB6-BsF5v1Tl3fIUTBFw/w400-h266/FF2-033%20p09.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Throughout the book Dworkin always chose the most reductive explanations possible for male attitudes and responses, as for example when she claimed that “Most women are not distinct, private individuals to most men; and so the fuck tends toward the class assertion of dominance. Women live inside this reality of being owned and being fucked” (p. 83). And, “[T]he hatred of women is a source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right” (p. 175). And so on and on.</div><div><br /></div><div>The writing is at times incisive, but more often erratic, highly repetitive, and feverish, with chains of assertions carried along by Dworkin’s exultant, self-perpetuating anger. It is testimony to the delusional bitterness of feminist ideology that such ranting has been taken as insight—and one need only read the eulogies upon her death and the many commendations of her brilliance to see how many feminists are still unashamed to admire even while denying Dworkin’s openly expressed hatred. </div><div><br /></div><div>At times in the book, Dworkin suggested that a sexuality of loving equality between men and women might be possible. But the only concrete example she was willing to provide was self-admittedly not equal but female-supremacist: it was a model imagined by 19th century American feminist Victoria Woodhull, whom she called “the great advocate of the female-first model of intercourse” for whom “women had a natural right—a right that inhered in the nature of intercourse itself—to be entirely self-determining, the controlling and dominating partner, the one whose desire determined the event, the one who both initiates and is the final authority on what the sex is and will be” (p. 171). </div><div><br /></div><div>Here we see the deliberately asymmetrical logic of feminist rights advocacy: only when women control sexuality entirely—even controlling its meaning as sex or rape—can it approach “equality.” At other times in the book (see especially p. 156-158), Dworkin seemed to assert that the physical reality of intercourse—which involved violating the integrity of the female body—made it innately unequal, and therefore always to some degree an enactment of male power over women.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuKwMcyG0A9HZB10XjYvxCVzekY8A54Yep1qamkiMbI4l35zadpDBYb6zVJkxvWLB9UCsGc0fHKcgoNj3U2jTtKi1YBIEXaztLLvwfNNCvVTV2Ndfa92iNdvdjMfZRT0iJxpxjSyuTL82zEWaVuERPdpN8a8s3qugsM8OjmPJgo73ue0PWhx2-ry265Q/s2083/FF2-033%20p11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2083" data-original-width="1600" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuKwMcyG0A9HZB10XjYvxCVzekY8A54Yep1qamkiMbI4l35zadpDBYb6zVJkxvWLB9UCsGc0fHKcgoNj3U2jTtKi1YBIEXaztLLvwfNNCvVTV2Ndfa92iNdvdjMfZRT0iJxpxjSyuTL82zEWaVuERPdpN8a8s3qugsM8OjmPJgo73ue0PWhx2-ry265Q/w154-h200/FF2-033%20p11.jpg" width="154" /></a></div>In 1983, 500 men gathered in St. Paul, Minnesota, to hear Dworkin give a speech at the Midwest Regional Conference of the National Organization for Changing Men (now the National Organization for Men Against Sexism). The speech was called “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There is No Rape.” As the men might have expected, Dworkin pulled no punches, granted them no exemptions as pro-feminist men who wanted to “change” men. She ripped into them, telling them that if they thought the problem of misogyny and abuse and exploitation was “out there,” they were wrong. It was “in you,” she told them. “The pimps and the warmongers speak for you” (“I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce,” p. 165). And she told them that as men they were full of “contempt and hostility in [their] attitudes towards women and children” (p. 166). </div><div><br /></div><div>She harangued them, derided them, and threatened them that if they couldn’t end rape at least for one day they could never claim to believe in equality or care about women. They had not done it because they clearly did not really want to. And therefore, she said, “The shame of men in front of women [was] an appropriate response both to what men do and to what men do not do” (170). Until they could “end rape” and call off their side, as she called it, their shame and guilt “were not good enough” (p. 170).</div><div><br /></div><div>That was what Dworkin had to give to men, shame and guilt, endless denunciation, and the impossible task of ending rape, which she claimed was “so little” (171) to ask. </div><div><br /></div><div>They could also live like her gay husband, writing articles and books about how they had renounced being men and encouraging other men to feel shame. And even then, they would have to look every day, metaphorically, at least, as Stoltenberg had actually looked, at a poster in his home that said “Dead men don’t rape” (xxii), the poster that Dworkin had placed above the desk where she wrote her screeds. No wonder Stoltenberg could not bear to be a man. Even renouncing manhood was not enough for Andrea Dworkin and the legions of feminists she continues to inspire. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> Janice Fiamengo</div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-19136256059163238032023-05-07T12:17:00.000-04:002023-05-07T12:17:06.244-04:00The Shamelessness of Feminist Affirmative Action - Janice Fiamengo<div>As feminists were transforming universities into centers of higher indoctrination, feminist activists were also changing the workforce by mandating affirmative action. Upending the merit principle entirely, feminists made it law that women be hired because they are women. More than 50 years later, they’re still at it. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmTK_cKkSDkKrNoQtQ4NB22WmbdpzxENHFLmay_hYFPWKzcD4NqIxdfeyhUnv4eeszFl1_DKIBqnFeDfbJ5nyAWfLcxNU1mMbxBR77VmvVswWadwejolRrOa0cEqMuY8M4PRrYE0WSyvn9866fobo21_YJQokWkHYRn0htBDOkiRnBFOFgabLQpivYkg/s3289/FF2-032%20pexels-kindel-media-7688458%20b.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2935" data-original-width="3289" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmTK_cKkSDkKrNoQtQ4NB22WmbdpzxENHFLmay_hYFPWKzcD4NqIxdfeyhUnv4eeszFl1_DKIBqnFeDfbJ5nyAWfLcxNU1mMbxBR77VmvVswWadwejolRrOa0cEqMuY8M4PRrYE0WSyvn9866fobo21_YJQokWkHYRn0htBDOkiRnBFOFgabLQpivYkg/w200-h179/FF2-032%20pexels-kindel-media-7688458%20b.png" width="200" /></a></div><br /><div>In the year 2020, the Irish government announced that it would use taxpayer money to create 20 women-only professor positions to close the alleged academic gender gap. Designed to raise the percentage of female profs at Irish postsecondary institutions, the move was hailed as a “game-changing moment,” with the Minister of State for higher education Mary Mitchell O’Connor stating that she was “incredibly proud that this intervention will ensure a swifter gender re-balance.”</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div>It's not at all clear what there is to be proud of in admitting that women aren’t good enough to advance on merit and that therefore Big Daddy government must ride to their rescue. But honesty about affirmative action is perennially in short supply. In this case, the minister stressed with patent dishonesty that “Appointments to these posts will be subject to the highest standards and rigorous assessment processes as currently adopted by the institutions for prestigious posts at these levels.” </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgILRWiMzafCNGfZG8_r8idyJGXqlA7UP5UxezqJSU1lkKZKNOsD3U5lEeAG32_kqChbAXSzL81DRYD2FAHGeJDYVUXX1GX5JA8dH5t2Q2Ln2Fbgnwv9E-YvuwGOszn2jX-Gq_gWGuENdxNM3zCOV7HaoGuALjShVJUsrtDkqZ-klgNsXHA6z_UO9CEDw/s1280/FF2-032%20All%20female%20interview.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="1280" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgILRWiMzafCNGfZG8_r8idyJGXqlA7UP5UxezqJSU1lkKZKNOsD3U5lEeAG32_kqChbAXSzL81DRYD2FAHGeJDYVUXX1GX5JA8dH5t2Q2Ln2Fbgnwv9E-YvuwGOszn2jX-Gq_gWGuENdxNM3zCOV7HaoGuALjShVJUsrtDkqZ-klgNsXHA6z_UO9CEDw/w400-h200/FF2-032%20All%20female%20interview.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />It doesn’t take a PhD to recognize that choosing applicants on the basis of sex—and thus excluding those who might well have superior qualifications—obviously dilutes the intellectual standards allegedly being upheld. But nobody in the article, or in the Irish government, it seems, was allowed to state such an obvious truth. </div><div><br /></div><div>This is just one example in one profession in one country of a practice that has been widely pursued for many decades, in which men’s taxpayer money pays for unfair professional advantages for women who then, as often as not, make a career out of claiming to be oppressed (for a handy outline of cases in Canada, see the archives of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship). That is the off-the-charts hypocrisy of affirmative action.</div><div><br /></div><div>Sometimes referred to as employment equity, preferential hiring, or diversity hiring, affirmative action has a long, complicated and contentious history, and has taken various forms since the 1960s. These range from steps to prevent discrimination to protocols to guarantee discrimination. While almost no one disagrees with preventing discrimination, the mandating of gender and racial preference—whatever the lofty rationale offered—should strike any unbiased observer as illogical and morally bankrupt.</div><div><br /></div><div>Affirmative action usually takes the form of either an explicit or a flexible quota system for members of stipulated identity groups, usually racial minorities, people with disabilities, and women. Practiced everywhere from private companies to large corporations to all levels of government work, affirmative action represents a profound repudiation of meritocratic and market-driven common sense. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI60HFQZZDhtS4_U-8qCWnPlABqoe5R-z0-_QZJEcZEn9I5AC72gUe4mfoUdSOOCCA3Q2o-OuJrSv35crORfqMpXEhBe6sZwl_tNoYB3QH4HSVovb94XWoEjVKz1VRk9UFkbtbIDA323r1DW7eNoxm1C-bU1uBJBkubGNSTf8NrXHqiIeFGx8kdkJsyQ/s6000/FF2-032%20pexels-yan-krukov-8837484%20b.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="6000" data-original-width="4000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI60HFQZZDhtS4_U-8qCWnPlABqoe5R-z0-_QZJEcZEn9I5AC72gUe4mfoUdSOOCCA3Q2o-OuJrSv35crORfqMpXEhBe6sZwl_tNoYB3QH4HSVovb94XWoEjVKz1VRk9UFkbtbIDA323r1DW7eNoxm1C-bU1uBJBkubGNSTf8NrXHqiIeFGx8kdkJsyQ/s320/FF2-032%20pexels-yan-krukov-8837484%20b.png" width="213" /></a></div>Second only to the feminist transformation of academia, affirmative action has demonstrated feminist power to profoundly alter North American and other western societies, creating a hierarchy of preferred identity groups with able-bodied heterosexual white men at the bottom. Such men are implicitly or explicitly excluded from many employment and educational opportunities while still being castigated and shamed as privileged. </div><div><br /></div><div>And although the enforcement of this hierarchy is widespread, it is also widely denied. Anyone who mentions it is mocked and condemned. Often affirmative action is presented as a temporary measure, and always it is cloaked in the language of justice. Many people, unaware of its extensive history, simply accept it as a frustrating but relatively short-lived and isolated occurrence. But it isn’t. It is a permanent feature of authoritarian regimes designed to increase the reach of the state while disempowering and demoralizing those who wish to live as self-governing individuals. </div><div><br /></div><div>Affirmative action was rampant when I was on the job market in 1999, nearly 24 years ago. At that time, I was one amongst two all-female shortlists of four candidates each at the University of Ottawa and the University of Saskatchewan, the latter where I took up my first position. At the time, everyone knew that female candidates had an unfair advantage over male candidates. I had attended graduate school with some outstandingly talented men who were excluded from many opportunities to work in their chosen field simply because they were white and male. </div><div><br /></div><div>During the time I taught at the University of Saskatchewan from 1999-2003, the English department conducted four job searches using an equity framework. I was told this meant simply that where two or more candidates were equally qualified, the candidate whose hiring fulfilled the university’s equity goals would be selected. In reality, candidates are rarely “equally qualified,” and qualifications soon cease to matter once the goal has been set to hire a woman or a racial minority. Equity by its nature involves gross discrimination at all stages of the hiring process.</div><div><br /></div><div>White male candidates who applied for positions at the University of Saskatchewan were not, of course, told that they were wasting their time—but they were. Their applications were simply put into a pile that never received serious consideration. Members of the hiring committee were not explicitly instructed, and certainly never admitted, that even outstanding white men should be overlooked—but they were. We were explicitly told that we should not discuss the person hired as a special equity hire; on the contrary, we were to insist that she was chosen for her academic qualifications. In this way, the overt rejection of merit is continually hidden from general view. </div><div><br /></div><div>The injustice goes back decades, and the process by which women became the favored affirmative action recipients is an instructive example of feminist “Me first!” ideology in action. Historically, the feminist method has consistently been to infiltrate and eventually colonize social reform movements first established by men, turning them into vehicles for female grievance and assertions of supremacy: this is how the movement for the abolition of slavery spawned the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls; and how agitation for the prohibition of alcohol became a vehicle for feminist evangelism. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/V8QgjbPeESg" width="320" youtube-src-id="V8QgjbPeESg"></iframe></div><br />In the case of affirmative action, feminists who became involved in the Civil Rights and related movements of the 1960s became annoyed that the movements did not center them. They complained about the sexism they allegedly experienced, with radical feminist Robin Morgan objecting that such movement were “hip and radical for the men, but filled with the same old chores, harassment, and bottling-up of inner rage for the women, as usual” (qtd. In Daniels, The Fourth Revolution, p. 126). </div><div><br /></div><div>Energized by their sense of themselves as slighted, feminists began to insist that women required the same concern and action on their behalf as were being proposed for black Americans. Although the history of women is quite different from the history of African Americans, feminists were made uneasy by the attention that was not being directed at them. </div><div><br /></div><div>In 1964, the United States Congress had enacted the Civil Rights Act to prohibit racial and sexual discrimination in hiring or promotions. The clear target of the legislation was black Americans, since no other group in the United States had so clearly suffered the effects of discriminatory and exclusionary policies. As originally proposed, the bill actually outlawed only racial discrimination, though it was amended at the last moment to outlaw sex discrimination also, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to investigate complaints of discrimination, was set up.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the following year, Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246, which required all government contractors and subcontractors to take affirmative action to expand job opportunities for racial minorities. </div><div><br /></div><div>At first, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission focused its enforcement efforts entirely on racial discrimination, a seeming slap in the face to the women’s cause. In response, feminists formed the National Organization for Women, spearheaded by Betty Friedan, who had claimed in her book The Feminine Mystique that the woman’s suburban home in the early 1960s was “in reality a comfortable concentration camp” where she “suffered a slow death of mind and spirit” (p. 369).</div><div> </div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqqZhgN0vSsZwemwJ0bOCCiov12fswnB3BmIlmXuQz9TVUEBNF0_0eOxYWvQ5h9FotQ4zD86FhX-8rKeU59OAr8CfsOXWqp-dxvIxantoU4lRQisu32NdR7PQyywLjtRgWaJ_-sWqfcJ8pffU7I_jFiJ7K5hmezl35zKPGSpnoSwLm2U3S050VRy-63g/s738/p07%20Betty%20Friedan.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="737" data-original-width="738" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqqZhgN0vSsZwemwJ0bOCCiov12fswnB3BmIlmXuQz9TVUEBNF0_0eOxYWvQ5h9FotQ4zD86FhX-8rKeU59OAr8CfsOXWqp-dxvIxantoU4lRQisu32NdR7PQyywLjtRgWaJ_-sWqfcJ8pffU7I_jFiJ7K5hmezl35zKPGSpnoSwLm2U3S050VRy-63g/w200-h200/p07%20Betty%20Friedan.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Betty Friedan</td></tr></tbody></table>The National Organization for Women, or NOW, was set up in 1966, with Friedan as president, pledging to “take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American Society.” To that end, NOW filed suit against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to force it to comply with its own government rules. It also sued the country’s 1300 largest corporations for alleged sex discrimination.</div><div><br /></div><div>Such action receives a sympathetic description in Robert Daniels’ book The Fourth Revolution: Transformations in American Society from the Sixties to the Present, which not surprisingly takes a celebratory view of feminist bellicosity. Daniels affirms feminists’ own resentful certainty that “The women’s movement was the Cinderella of the Great Society” (Daniels, p. 125), referring to President Johnson’s domestic agenda to eliminate social injustice. Feminists chaffed under their angry sense that Johnson was more concerned, as Daniels notes, with “blacks and the poor” (p. 125) than with women, and they were galvanized by evidence that other groups were receiving favored treatment denied to them. At their second national convention in 1967 NOW adopted a “Bill of Rights for Women” and lobbied President Johnson to put more teeth into legislation to aid women.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the fall of 1967, Johnson duly amended Executive Order 11246 to include affirmative action for women—and for the next five and a half decades, it became impossible to speak about equity legislation without emphasizing women. As a result of the new legislation, federal contractors were required to take action to expand employment opportunities for women as well as racial minorities. Something similar happened a few years later, when President Richard Nixon issued Order No. 4 authorizing flexible goals and timetables to correct what was called “underutilization” of black Americans by federal contractors; in the following year, again under pressure from feminists, he revised the order to include women. </div><div><br /></div><div>Every time the American government tried to do something for black Americans, feminist groups made sure that the measure was extended to women; ultimately the promotion of women in the workforce came to overshadow and even sideline black men, whose employment status has consistently lagged behind both white and black women.</div><div><br /></div><div>Canada had a quite different historical relationship to slavery and to its black population, many of whom were recent immigrants. Still, it followed the lead of the United States closely, enacting similar legislation and championing the cause of women. In 1967, the Public Service Employment Act outlawed sex discrimination in the federal civil service, and in the same year, the Royal Commission on the Status of Women was established, which issued a report three years later recommending measures to promote women’s advancement in government employment. </div><div><br /></div><div>In 1971, Canada established the Office of Equal Opportunity, while in 1983 the Treasury Board introduced an Affirmative Action Policy to guarantee “equitable representation and distribution” of women, Aboriginal people, and the disabled, amended in 1986 to include visible minorities. Over the past 40 years, this legislation has been continually renewed and further entrenched. </div><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCAZTtl_DLGqdptyDDsdky0VIwYsyhen9LlSQVxeARHc-iqhFR28HfIWioPOtIYGtnoW870-TO6h9BFcd2p7dgiUdE6jyauCmieeNidiqg9Ewd3ss9Gw1YQu2hTGKItVqAGqZx48IEsK4p63VpNaleuSs8_91D6uS-W_XLxOh7xdM8UnQzXBGKctwC_A/s1176/FF2-032%20p13%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1176" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCAZTtl_DLGqdptyDDsdky0VIwYsyhen9LlSQVxeARHc-iqhFR28HfIWioPOtIYGtnoW870-TO6h9BFcd2p7dgiUdE6jyauCmieeNidiqg9Ewd3ss9Gw1YQu2hTGKItVqAGqZx48IEsK4p63VpNaleuSs8_91D6uS-W_XLxOh7xdM8UnQzXBGKctwC_A/w200-h136/FF2-032%20p13%20b.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rosalie Abella</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Feminist equity proponents envision such legislation extending well into the future, repeatedly referring to the “systemic” or “historic” group exclusions that allegedly cause it to be needed. Canada’s Judge Rosalie Abella, who authored the 1984 Report of the Commission on Equality in Employment, rationalized the overt discrimination required by affirmative action in the following rather garbled manner. She wrote:</div><div><br /></div><div>“The reason in human rights that we do not treat all individuals the same way is that not all individuals have suffered historic generic exclusion because of group membership. Where assumptive barriers have impeded the fairness of competition for some individuals, they should be removed even if this means treating some people differently. Otherwise, we can never correct disadvantage, chained as we would be to the civil libertarian pedestal of equal treatment of every individual. There is nothing to apologize for in giving the arbitrarily disadvantaged a prior claim in remedial responses.” (Abella, qtd by Martin Loney, The Pursuit of Division, p. 9).</div><div><br /></div><div>Abella’s statement is riddled with logical fallacies that in a sane era would not be acceptable even in a first-year undergraduate essay. They are even more appalling when written by an activist feminist judge, eventually a member of the Supreme Court, and widely accepted as progressivist wisdom. Abella speaks of individuals who “suffered historic generic exclusion because of group membership.” By definition, individuals today have not experienced historic exclusion. Why should it matter to a recent immigrant from Hong Kong or India that some racial minorities suffered exclusionary treatment many generations ago? Why should it matter to a woman born in 1984 that a woman born in 1884 had to wait a few years for the right to vote?</div><div><br /></div><div>The next sentence is even more logically tangled. “Where […[ barriers have impeded the fairness of competition for some individuals, they should be removed …” That’s right—let’s remove all barriers that impede fairness of competition. But the sentence ends “even if this means treating some people differently.” Why is it not sufficient simply to remove barriers? Why set up new barriers? Such is not explained in the following sentence, which claims melodramatically, “Otherwise, we can never correct disadvantage …” Nonsense. Removing barriers does correct disadvantage to the extent that the law can correct disadvantage.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_QoWcbxpdWojTD9Izq2BzAY5GWUITMfYnsr48clLE25OGLcjdRAAW_botOjMjVUHC0rvMjJDNi0GBF3gd2GyiXNvzsmS8vughIshc76d6zNeluetd0qDpC-JD34oKLS2gSmBzq-TwzXSq-wFIuVLmMn8T1irsDH-RM33XfhbdKxeqbDlOm4gEi-bPAw/s1045/FF2-032%20p15.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1045" data-original-width="1045" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_QoWcbxpdWojTD9Izq2BzAY5GWUITMfYnsr48clLE25OGLcjdRAAW_botOjMjVUHC0rvMjJDNi0GBF3gd2GyiXNvzsmS8vughIshc76d6zNeluetd0qDpC-JD34oKLS2gSmBzq-TwzXSq-wFIuVLmMn8T1irsDH-RM33XfhbdKxeqbDlOm4gEi-bPAw/w200-h200/FF2-032%20p15.png" width="200" /></a></div>Abella implies that groups treated unfairly 75 years ago, for example, are still experiencing disadvantage today; but this is not proved and is not true. Abella doesn’t even try to justify why individuals today must be compensated for discrimination allegedly experienced by previous generations; and she certainly never explains why able-bodied white men should pay a penalty for historical injustice, where it existed, that they themselves never practiced and never benefited from. Her simplistic racism and sexism are, in her own words, unapologetic. This is a recently retired Canadian Supreme Court Justice.</div><div><br /></div><div>It’s difficult not to conclude that the dumbing down of everything—of the school system, politics, journalism, the judiciary, academia, scientific research—that mass dumbing down owes much to affirmative action, with its determined evisceration of merit and fairness in the name of social justice. A society cannot ignore excellence without eventually experiencing the corrosive impact of its own bad decisions. Alas, the affirmative action social experiment that began in the 1960s is far from over.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> Janice Fiamengo</div><div><br /></div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-59377487709989939762023-05-07T11:52:00.002-04:002023-05-07T11:52:26.390-04:00Feminism’s Long History of Anti-Whiteness - Janice Fiamengo<div>Recently propelled into the spotlight through discussions of critical race theory, anti-white hatred has a long history in Second Wave feminism. In this video, I offer an outline of how white feminists came to accept second-class status within the movement they created. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwiGINMjPnY_ja0HCzGbg4w6VjeQTI7rtP4pvxKwjtR25k-AW2UrbCO0RrN5fpsFY7JOhTwu-YRvNnSxL9Auk5MOoyNRq2Dx_q2OeyexNtjJsD7tqk_7xzu3kiVuhDwgffXzmZ-v3mfw8UEUCccRyNwnT1KMVdbq6K7Va3atXJYhfhzqY7tPwXtuwvnw/s1067/FF2-031%20Steinem%20pic%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="881" data-original-width="1067" height="165" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwiGINMjPnY_ja0HCzGbg4w6VjeQTI7rtP4pvxKwjtR25k-AW2UrbCO0RrN5fpsFY7JOhTwu-YRvNnSxL9Auk5MOoyNRq2Dx_q2OeyexNtjJsD7tqk_7xzu3kiVuhDwgffXzmZ-v3mfw8UEUCccRyNwnT1KMVdbq6K7Va3atXJYhfhzqY7tPwXtuwvnw/w200-h165/FF2-031%20Steinem%20pic%20b.png" width="200" /></a></div>In the late 1960s, as we’ve seen, feminists capitalized on the enormous social power of female victimhood. White feminists at that time were certainly aware of racism, but they were largely unconcerned by it as a competing paradigm of victimization. In her 1972 essay “Sisterhood,” feminist leader Gloria Steinem asserted that women had a deep bond with other women born of shared patriarchal oppression; it was a bond that transcended all differences. She stated that “The odd thing about these deep and personal connections among women is that they often leap barriers of age, economics, worldly experience, race, culture—all the barriers that, in male or mixed society, seem so impossible to cross” (“Sisterhood,” p. 129). Sisterhood, forged in the universal experience of male dominance, was powerful. This was the utopian position of most feminist leaders in the early 1970s. </div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp-M_abeI_TvTHSCnuw4pzxFRrVX3_7HZcAbp7a2Hd-6dsvDNekVuJCCFt2mvHpEMVtKmkKQFjg8U3uoc-Dkm5TCA3tpcTOLifLnJxqcu2yTpUzifttIKv3AlWA4BJvtV0bA2fAd8xKj2nLw4tVsqB2B2e0vtc8ERvVGQvD27XWd95UBZG7zWkFe5mYg/s1584/FF2-031%20Millett%201%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1077" data-original-width="1584" height="136" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjp-M_abeI_TvTHSCnuw4pzxFRrVX3_7HZcAbp7a2Hd-6dsvDNekVuJCCFt2mvHpEMVtKmkKQFjg8U3uoc-Dkm5TCA3tpcTOLifLnJxqcu2yTpUzifttIKv3AlWA4BJvtV0bA2fAd8xKj2nLw4tVsqB2B2e0vtc8ERvVGQvD27XWd95UBZG7zWkFe5mYg/w200-h136/FF2-031%20Millett%201%20b.png" width="200" /></a></div>In her 1970 book Sexual Politics, Kate Millett acknowledged racism in the United States, but saw it as a dying ideology, one fast losing its hold on society. The ideology of sexism, in contrast, remained in full force: “Groups who rule by birthright are fast disappearing, yet there remains one ancient and universal scheme for the domination of one birth group by another—the scheme that prevails in the area of sex” (Sexual Politics, p. 24). Women everywhere were linked by this allegedly “universal” injustice. Feminist journalist and activist Susan Brownmiller made a similar claim in her 1975 book Against Our Will, which made the argument that “From prehistoric times to the present, rape has been nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (p. 15). In those heady days, patriarchy was the singular unifying truth of the women’s movement. It's worth noting that Kate Millett was not afraid, as later generations of feminists would become, to harshly condemn non-western cultures as worse for women than western cultures, which she admitted had been softened, “indeed moderated somewhat by the introduction of courtly love” (45). </div><div><br /></div><div>Courtly love was the Medieval concept of consecrated adoration of women. Recognizing the lesser evil of western societies was not yet forbidden in the women’s movement, and Millett condemned non-white patriarchies with particular relish, angrily enumerating the evils they had done and continued to do: </div><div><br /></div><div>“The history of patriarchy presents a variety of cruelties and barbarities: the suttee execution in India, the crippling deformity of footbinding in China, the lifelong ignominy of the veil in Islam, or the widespread persecution of sequestration, the gynacium, and purdah. Phenomenon [sic] such as clitoroidectomy, clitoral incision, the sale and enslavement of women under one guise or another, involuntary and child marriages, concubinage and prostitution, still take place—the first in Africa, the latter in the Near East and Far East, the last generally” (Sexual Politics, p. 46). </div><div><br /></div><div>Millett might have been shocked to think how quickly white feminists like herself would learn to refrain from criticizing African, Islamic, or other non-western cultural practices. As feminism became an increasingly utopian ideology, it became less interested in the practical conditions of real women and much more interested in ideological purity inspired by anti-western Marxist and Maoist theorizing.</div><div><br /></div><div>White feminists soon showed themselves willing to sell out the truth—as well as other women—in exchange for ideological orthodoxy.</div><div><br /></div><div>By 1979, when Gloria Steinem and radical feminist author Robin Morgan co-authored an article on the practice of removing the clitoris in women and girls, a practice that existed in many Islamic and African countries, these two canny feminist leaders were well-attuned to the racial sensitivity of the topic and went out of their way to stress how fully they empathized with how “The situation is further complicated by the understandable suspicion on the part of many African and Arab governments and individuals that Western interest in the matter is motivated not by humanitarian concerns but by a racist or neocolonialist desire to eradicate indigenous cultures” (Steinem and Morgan, “The International Crime of Genital Mutilation,” in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, p. 336). </div><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEintvkW_IPvJbxVMRL_WFwNRYnEq_7JkzKQdBSTIhrTO9d225qT1IGlo1Z-U8vWWCniYIHCSjReQ96OYcVrXcqLwGwFMxOHhagrVD3V5rVaxEuT65TAFI0VmnFhIJmlWq_2D5dNirpzDZ-_9t7UNb3oQr_cfsqEzxMtL8YtwwEcIcHTl3-_0dmybIiEwQ/s980/FF2-031%20Robin%20Morgan%20-%20Ms%20Mag%20Editorin%20Chief%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="656" data-original-width="980" height="134" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEintvkW_IPvJbxVMRL_WFwNRYnEq_7JkzKQdBSTIhrTO9d225qT1IGlo1Z-U8vWWCniYIHCSjReQ96OYcVrXcqLwGwFMxOHhagrVD3V5rVaxEuT65TAFI0VmnFhIJmlWq_2D5dNirpzDZ-_9t7UNb3oQr_cfsqEzxMtL8YtwwEcIcHTl3-_0dmybIiEwQ/w200-h134/FF2-031%20Robin%20Morgan%20-%20Ms%20Mag%20Editorin%20Chief%20b.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Robin Morgan</td></tr></tbody></table><br />Steinem and Morgan were quick to accept that previous Western concern over clitoridectomy must have been “racist” or “neocolonialist”—why? Because a Kenyan leader had said it was. They wrote, “As Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, noted in his book, Facing Mount Kenya, the key mobilization of many forces for Kenyan independence from the British was in direct response to attempts by Church of Scotland missionaries in 1929 to suppress clitoridectomy. Patriarchal authorities, whether tribal or imperial, have always considered as central to their freedom and power the right to define what is done with ‘their’ women” (“The International Crime of Genital Mutilation, p. 336-37).</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEippNMd2rvUYKRPyW-vSpVvtbZMubHb1OB7b3jKIPx2rmBGwnLmRmSP6Qp94UG5SleZoKtqLFtRx4tH23H3v4z9JF0qhcutIVFTWpHkxkneH78ekBRGeor4UefRDyFGRWBz4JKw_BB446HpsKGuKblKDUXJwF8rVjWIhM1UoUQgooI8E-m8KGer7xSBcg/s960/p07%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="960" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEippNMd2rvUYKRPyW-vSpVvtbZMubHb1OB7b3jKIPx2rmBGwnLmRmSP6Qp94UG5SleZoKtqLFtRx4tH23H3v4z9JF0qhcutIVFTWpHkxkneH78ekBRGeor4UefRDyFGRWBz4JKw_BB446HpsKGuKblKDUXJwF8rVjWIhM1UoUQgooI8E-m8KGer7xSBcg/w200-h133/p07%20b.png" width="200" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>Here we see the distinctly anti-Western emphasis that began to dominate feminist thought and would flower over the next decade into overt anti-white propagandizing. Steinem and Morgan, two well-educated, free, and sexually liberated white women—committed to the distinctly western concepts of female sexual pleasure and sexual autonomy—were careful to express sympathy with Kenyan men who opposed the Church of Scotland missionaries, men and women, who had attempted in 1929 to suppress the practice of clitoridectomy. Without providing any evidence or feeling the need to explain their conclusion, Steinem and Morgan agreed with a Kenyan man that the missionaries who objected to cutting off girls’ clitorises—which was, after all, the feminists’ own position—that these missionaries were motivated by racism and therefore were at least as objectionable as those men who promoted the cutting off of girls’ clitorises.</div><div><br /></div><div>Steinem and Morgan distanced themselves from the white missionaries in articulating their own superior moral position: “Past campaigns against female mutilation, conducted for whatever ambiguous or even deplorable reasons, need not preclude new approaches that might be more effective because they would be sensitive to the cultures involved and, most important, supportive of the women affected, and in response to their leadership.” </div><div><br /></div><div>Note the phrasing: being “sensitive to [non-western] cultures” and “responsive” to [non-western women’s] “leadership”: these are the touchstones that later generations of feminists would adopt and which would harden into a rigid orthodoxy. This was not moral relativism, as it is sometimes assumed to be. It was the acceptance of the outright moral inferiority of western culture, specifically its Christian inheritance and its individualist ethos. The mandated perspective of feminists became: always assume that all previous western initiatives, even those specifically designed to end female suffering, could not have had humanitarian motives; and always declare a commitment that is pro-indigenous and anti-colonial. Western culture itself was not considered indigenous or worthy of being defended.</div><div><br /></div><div>As these Marxist ideological currents took hold, the relative harmony created by feminism’s focus on shared oppression decisively shattered in the 1980s. A collection of articles in a book called Conflicts in Feminism, edited by American feminist academics Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller in 1987, made clear that class and especially racial differences had set women at war with each other over who was more oppressed, and who complicit in other women’s oppression. It was a war from which feminist unity never fully recovered, though phenomena such as the Women’s Marches and #MeToo social media campaigns have attempted with some success to reunite women under the banner of shared sexual victimhood. </div><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfbff_mU1bI_dH_O1_MPjsFzA6ruWY96rNgXPR40RHdlIAwe48tjrNtAdtrXaXU-Ptd3J3SicwP0pV9YMueyab5tXbPg9Ki4em2ZH4BSDDUZ1aPBVgda2xb-zFbM-R5G3h8XXttzAQSA_x1_6Y3KAvRFYFcV9orhOLa-g7MCtMfZo34Y_rGYQW9KSY_w/s1437/FF2-031%20Bell%20Hooks%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1077" data-original-width="1437" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfbff_mU1bI_dH_O1_MPjsFzA6ruWY96rNgXPR40RHdlIAwe48tjrNtAdtrXaXU-Ptd3J3SicwP0pV9YMueyab5tXbPg9Ki4em2ZH4BSDDUZ1aPBVgda2xb-zFbM-R5G3h8XXttzAQSA_x1_6Y3KAvRFYFcV9orhOLa-g7MCtMfZo34Y_rGYQW9KSY_w/w200-h150/FF2-031%20Bell%20Hooks%20b.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bell Hooks</td></tr></tbody></table><br />In one essay in the Conflicts in Feminism collection, prominent black feminist theorist Bell Hooks went so far as to say that “We cannot speak of all women as being oppressed.” In her view, most white women would have to give up the oppressed designation (to be fair, she also exempted herself as a well-paid academic—but she definitely did not exempt black women in general). The white co-author of the essay, Mary Childers, tentatively agreed with Hooks, stressing that “An exclusive focus on male/female conflict serves as a distraction from other kinds of conflict” (63)—precisely that between white and black women. The women’s rights struggle had in 20 short years became a multi-faceted tribal war amongst different categories of women vying for superior status.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYHrfLQWOmjucwYvbbSRoVLQLq3Te2fL8zH3ng_x5KulcBWH5Fz8Ft3GQnOM-czkziqySzdRRBm6Lu9DwK4NshyYZKwZu9_JkIrm_kjG4KMZCAJeewRIrzwaBOVx5v4upTO6jxGrkR3uHFay8QNxP6_hcSNsIeKaoi7RkQEadalOlLGHwXFmO8j16ObA/s872/p10%20Cry%20baby%20feminist%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="872" height="144" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYHrfLQWOmjucwYvbbSRoVLQLq3Te2fL8zH3ng_x5KulcBWH5Fz8Ft3GQnOM-czkziqySzdRRBm6Lu9DwK4NshyYZKwZu9_JkIrm_kjG4KMZCAJeewRIrzwaBOVx5v4upTO6jxGrkR3uHFay8QNxP6_hcSNsIeKaoi7RkQEadalOlLGHwXFmO8j16ObA/w200-h144/p10%20Cry%20baby%20feminist%20b.png" width="200" /></a></div>For many white women, being told that they weren’t oppressed and being charged with racial oppressiveness was a devastating allegation that denied their prized identities as valiant victims; but because it employed the same oppressor/oppressed binary at the heart of their theory of patriarchal oppression, it could not be rejected without imperilling the logic of feminism itself. If white privilege was structurally parallel to male privilege, then how could white women maintain their virtuous victimhood? As it turned out, they could do so only by pledging to fight a reformulated enemy, specifically white supremacist heteropatriarchy.</div><div><br /></div><div>The moral imperative of this fight was made clear by feminist sociologist Peggy McIntosh in her much-reprinted 1988 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” in which she urged women to prove themselves more conscientious than men about what began around this time to be called systemic oppression. McIntosh, a professor of women’s studies, claimed that while very few men were “truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage,” white feminists owed it to their movement and themselves to be “outraged about unearned race advantage.” This was the true beginning of feminist agony over having white skin. </div><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5nhCiyaUbnjg6smwwQFcYUWctb_eeykLRAaDBh5fNEG09SeALGgasaTQdLSKtg7FgCc4ej2gIcWd-M2zwni5XX63GaqbBwfz6jjrwJmtt1k7-GDqzjaIxM4W0HPVxAF7dCBznYOhBRUrfzNz3n9nODUzf0SB8hEMHFrXp571kHqWEVayeSgSepds1XA/s1200/FF2-031%20peggy-mcintosh-headshot%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="1200" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5nhCiyaUbnjg6smwwQFcYUWctb_eeykLRAaDBh5fNEG09SeALGgasaTQdLSKtg7FgCc4ej2gIcWd-M2zwni5XX63GaqbBwfz6jjrwJmtt1k7-GDqzjaIxM4W0HPVxAF7dCBznYOhBRUrfzNz3n9nODUzf0SB8hEMHFrXp571kHqWEVayeSgSepds1XA/w200-h133/FF2-031%20peggy-mcintosh-headshot%20b.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Peggy McIntosh</td></tr></tbody></table>Along similar lines, Bell Hooks assured white women that they could avoid the worst of their guilt as oppressors if they committed to joining with black women in resisting white male power: “Naming yourself as privileged is not to name yourself as oppressive or dominating, because we have choices as to how we exercise privilege” (“A Conversation about Race and Class,” p. 75). White women accepted Hooks’ offer, eagerly confessing their white privilege, blaming white men, and committing a la McIntosh to dismantling so-called systemic white advantage through various acts of reparation. </div><div><br /></div><div>In the process, white women were forced to relinquish significant interpretative power to non-white women, and even sometimes to non-white men. Because white privilege was said to be a system of unearned advantages that whites were taught not to see—and that not seeing it was actually the evidence of the privilege—then committing to anti-racism meant accepting without question nearly any claim of racism made by a person of color. To deny a claim would be to reveal oneself as insufficiently aware and/or insufficiently morally sensitive. To retain moral purity, white women surrendered to women of color the near-absolute right to define the racial meaning of their own actions, a right still not in their control today. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvlfL6On7L4Cbu6WO4bLirljrj91NFV6ZUALWYdC5T69XlHdh6cQMED3aVFjEASrI6Wgk4UTb5IznNui87CsbV4IMDiS8dsq2nUGuB3p2z_DP3ZKwyZ_mix9AXeRt2_h8rktOO-aK58ecjfcjA0OhxpOEvPSNTNdOF_Ga8_TwuETRKnkeTnvchiDu-EA/s1365/FF2-031%20Psychosis%20of%20Whiteness.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="1000" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvlfL6On7L4Cbu6WO4bLirljrj91NFV6ZUALWYdC5T69XlHdh6cQMED3aVFjEASrI6Wgk4UTb5IznNui87CsbV4IMDiS8dsq2nUGuB3p2z_DP3ZKwyZ_mix9AXeRt2_h8rktOO-aK58ecjfcjA0OhxpOEvPSNTNdOF_Ga8_TwuETRKnkeTnvchiDu-EA/w146-h200/FF2-031%20Psychosis%20of%20Whiteness.jpg" width="146" /></a></div>And not surprisingly, charges of race and other forms of privilege came thick and fast in the next decade. In response to an influential 1993 essay on intersectionality by Kimberlé Crenshaw called “Beyond Racism and Misogyny,” the leveling of charges of privilege became a near-endless contest of one-upmanship that white women were bound to lose in an endless competition to claim the “lived experience,” in Crenshaw’s words, “at the bottom of multiple hierarchies.” The race to the bottom, where one’s understanding was allegedly clearest and one’s right to speak greatest, triggered an avalanche of claims of wounding and of verbal violence.</div><div><br /></div><div>During the 1990s, white feminists were also taken to task for favoring western societies in their accounts of world patriarchy, or in other words for accepting, as Kate Millett had done, that white men had created freer and better societies, including better for women, than existed in other parts of the world. A number of non-white feminist academics, among them Gloria Anzaldua, Gayatri Spivak, and Trinh T. Minh Ha, bristled at their implicit designation as the poor sisters of feminism, pitied in their Third World misery. </div><div><br /></div><div>In her book Looking White People in the Eye (1998), women’s studies academic Sherene Razack let white women know that white men were not better than other men in their treatment of women, and that saying so was white supremacist. White men, she claimed, were responsible for imperialism, racism, capitalist oppression, homophobia, and Islamophobia, and unless white women denounced all these forms of oppression, they too would be classed as imperialists, racists, oppressors, homophobes, and Islamophobes. </div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYlLbmaAH466EeSHUtASd1xpWVMyMo8lzhoUprqaF6yE2iDalTk24Bm9y_ZdyRCjldzGID316M4hMd61g9N0Me9gFn0eFPhvVyLrcbIMXW0whJpcy5_APNBlKVZtGk-vFpGCPYC0A6FT8xQsLjs-RvmtUVHv-3O8nCN4KPggeZCfkKHswiRCHudkb_Bw/s600/p14%20White%20privilege%203%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="432" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYlLbmaAH466EeSHUtASd1xpWVMyMo8lzhoUprqaF6yE2iDalTk24Bm9y_ZdyRCjldzGID316M4hMd61g9N0Me9gFn0eFPhvVyLrcbIMXW0whJpcy5_APNBlKVZtGk-vFpGCPYC0A6FT8xQsLjs-RvmtUVHv-3O8nCN4KPggeZCfkKHswiRCHudkb_Bw/w144-h200/p14%20White%20privilege%203%20b.png" width="144" /></a></div>Razack’s words dripped with angry sarcasm as she described white women’s reprehensible bias in assuming the superiority of western freedoms: </div><div>“Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh men confirm handily the superiority of Western men …. White women’s responses to articles on Muslim women and the veil include the sentiment that in comparison to Eastern women, Western women should consider their own men as gems of enlightenment and kindness” (83). </div><div><br /></div><div>There it was. White women were wrong to prefer life in a white western culture. In only a decade or two, it had become unacceptable to state that not being forced to wear a niqab was a good thing. It had become unacceptable to think that a culture that protected widows was more advanced than one that burned them on their husbands’ funeral pyres. Welcome to the upside-down world of intersectional feminism. </div><div><br /></div><div>Razack stipulated that all violence against women of color must be understood “within the context of racism and the histories of colonialism and imperialism” (84). In other words, the violence that women of color experienced in their societies could ultimately be laid at the feet of white men, who were its origin. Because white women could not bear to be accused of complicity in colonialism and imperialism, they found themselves willing to agree that it was racist to speak of honor killing as a problem particular to Islamic cultures. If it gained them the approval of their woman of color masters, they were even willing to agree that white male systems were the ultimate origin of all suffering and injustice—and indeed that became an article of faith of intersectional feminism.</div><div><br /></div><div>Feminism thus developed an all-encompassing theory of social experience which though sometimes inscrutable and self-contradictory in its details was simple enough in its basic outline for a child to understand: victims were better than non-victims, and white men were worse than anybody else. Victim ideology came to infiltrate and coopt all competing social movements, including even atheism, evangelical Christianity, and animal rights. So powerful was the ideology’s moral charge that some non-white and gay men seized the opportunity to escape the oppressor designation in exchange for victim status. Though all men remained vulnerable to feminist accusation, some men could establish a partial exemption by emphasizing their marginalized characteristics. </div><div><br /></div><div>Social class, the one remaining vector of real privilege in North American society, has largely fallen away from most discussion, allowing fantastically wealthy people in the universities, the entertainment industry, politics, and the media to reap the enormous benefits of their alleged victimhood while disavowing their obvious advantages over the destitute, the despairing, the discardable, the homeless, the suicides, the falsely accused, the wrongfully imprisoned, and all the dispossessed, most of whom are men of all races, including many white men. White feminists sold these men out because performing their own moral righteousness was more important to them than truth. </div><div><br /></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeHCfdYJPDtFmHYt9Ax4_iN0-ew6mDzRXQ97KzbgNgSsDDvRO9cQDx21q9pvRVgoCd5bTXvueMFPncZ6h3dVTzQ6wGQyh78qb7kn-fCvMSvr_WlTyOR8ZoWq22CxojCZ64XQzkmujTuRigfOVcVxIkG3JeMXBiEEB36cGFvqd8XikpeG7aPjENo3feZA/s893/FF2-031%20Robin%20Diangelo%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="815" data-original-width="893" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeHCfdYJPDtFmHYt9Ax4_iN0-ew6mDzRXQ97KzbgNgSsDDvRO9cQDx21q9pvRVgoCd5bTXvueMFPncZ6h3dVTzQ6wGQyh78qb7kn-fCvMSvr_WlTyOR8ZoWq22CxojCZ64XQzkmujTuRigfOVcVxIkG3JeMXBiEEB36cGFvqd8XikpeG7aPjENo3feZA/w200-h183/FF2-031%20Robin%20Diangelo%20b.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Robin Diangelo</td></tr></tbody></table>Some white women, when confronted with their alleged privilege in anti-racist struggle sessions, break down in tears, but we’ve even learned to be suspicious of such evidence of shame, penitence, and/or empathy. Robin DiAngelo in her book about white supremacism has scornfully repudiated such tears. White women’s tears are “one of the more pernicious enactments of white fragility” (133), “self-indulgent,” “narcissistic,” and “ineffective” (White Fragility, 135). </div><div><br /></div><div>The same women who used to say they would bathe in male tears are now told that their own are worthy of contempt. </div><div><br /></div><div>The attack on white womanhood does not represent a turning of the tide against feminism, alas. It merely points to the absurd and irrational, vicious volatility of all designations of virtuous victimhood. There will always be more self-proclaimed victims to replace white women, other skilled accusers to milk public outrage. We will not escape feminism’s social pathology until we recognize that a movement based on collective resentment will always require more targets for vilification.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> Janice Fiamengo</div><div><br /></div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-18575282375476478622023-05-07T07:16:00.000-04:002023-05-07T07:16:32.317-04:00Second Wave Feminism Conquered the Universities with Ease - Janice Fiamengo<div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">It is impossible to appreciate the impact of Second Wave feminism without recognizing its takeover of our universities. Evidence suggests that the takeover was quick and easy, and that feminism never even needed to hide its radicalism in order to conquer America’s institutions of higher learning without a fight. </span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjab7_JfwSJ8QcO4D-t9FpyuLP0WvvvSBCsk7bLPK2N31JZsT4Z9yusBBDMuQhVfLT2gT-IR4lerjYFBNpbQtcVCMmbpMgL7-DYIQgUrUybyNX85Z085IK0Dzb5nW38FxggROBRgXvVl1E9HPSeEEq65_qEDQpPS1mn9svfHNtSO4evr7IblfxIO2BAZQ/s3032/FF2-030%20The_Future_is_Feminist%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2560" data-original-width="3032" height="169" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjab7_JfwSJ8QcO4D-t9FpyuLP0WvvvSBCsk7bLPK2N31JZsT4Z9yusBBDMuQhVfLT2gT-IR4lerjYFBNpbQtcVCMmbpMgL7-DYIQgUrUybyNX85Z085IK0Dzb5nW38FxggROBRgXvVl1E9HPSeEEq65_qEDQpPS1mn9svfHNtSO4evr7IblfxIO2BAZQ/w200-h169/FF2-030%20The_Future_is_Feminist%20b.png" width="200" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>In 2008, a major publisher brought out a book titled The Evolution of American Women’s Studies: Reflections on Triumphs, Controversies, and Change. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Written by feminist academics involved in the founding of women’s studies programs across the United States, the book is well worth reading for its picture of the objectives and methodologies of Second Wave Feminism. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span><a name='more'></a></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The book contains essays by many feminist leaders of the 1960s and 1970s. These were the pioneers who launched the new women’s studies programs, taught the first courses in the field, and established the feminist journals that now largely control what passes for knowledge in our society. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Without the firm foothold they established in the academy, the feminist movement could never have become as powerful as it has, spreading out so decisively into the domains of law, medicine, politics, social services, journalism, entertainment, and Big Tech. </span></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIBu5QGrJMvrWk-ZdkUV8VOCGlejYYuFCjH3MhnlbBUXvbollmmvl_b_6eBaZI_m36JGVXlr8BJW7gmx699naPhYcp7txS5zctpfb5hwnqvGJwuQ5PKv2OFFbA8NHnW9U1r1FAGT5xEBRCpyngVS71JfXUIvG7If0FEgz-bYaLiCHW09d4SJPMeAmqkg/s2048/FF2-030%20Alice%20Ginsberg%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1361" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIBu5QGrJMvrWk-ZdkUV8VOCGlejYYuFCjH3MhnlbBUXvbollmmvl_b_6eBaZI_m36JGVXlr8BJW7gmx699naPhYcp7txS5zctpfb5hwnqvGJwuQ5PKv2OFFbA8NHnW9U1r1FAGT5xEBRCpyngVS71JfXUIvG7If0FEgz-bYaLiCHW09d4SJPMeAmqkg/w133-h200/FF2-030%20Alice%20Ginsberg%20b.png" width="133" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Alice Ginsberg</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>The book makes clear that women’s studies was always intended to have an activist agenda, percolating its resentful theories within the walls of the ivory tower but never content to let them stay there. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">“From the beginning, the goal of women’s studies was not merely to study women’s position in the world but to change it” (p. 10). So writes the volume editor Alice Ginsberg. Ginsberg does not attempt to hide the fact that women’s studies was never committed to the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge that would identify it as a genuine academic field. Her words are echoed by many other contributors, who foreground social goals. “I remain convinced that teaching antiracist, antihomophobic, anti-capitalist, cross-cultural , transnational women’s studies courses […] is still the most important and pleasurable work that I do.” [Beverly Guy-Sheftall, p. 111).</span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaDPk1q3B10a9ZW14RetRZKBJz6euOWc8yysSyRDWUIgd0QiZxN_DLdpsLD3IO25gUMJJigYCl0Rofr3pQNhGqBXCoept-cL5-f547GF7O6d-JJPAjd0eKPqKMy015Iq4O6rV-CqfR2QLrsLNDb9jbNokIuZtICinvaUELeHVcIhtKY98XMGinLllhdQ/s1276/FF2-030%20Evolution%20of%20American%20Women%E2%80%99s%20Studies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1276" data-original-width="827" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaDPk1q3B10a9ZW14RetRZKBJz6euOWc8yysSyRDWUIgd0QiZxN_DLdpsLD3IO25gUMJJigYCl0Rofr3pQNhGqBXCoept-cL5-f547GF7O6d-JJPAjd0eKPqKMy015Iq4O6rV-CqfR2QLrsLNDb9jbNokIuZtICinvaUELeHVcIhtKY98XMGinLllhdQ/w129-h200/FF2-030%20Evolution%20of%20American%20Women%E2%80%99s%20Studies.jpg" width="129" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>Ginsberg admits that the embrace of subjectivity and political partisanship caused some within the academy to view Women’s Studies “with great suspicion” (p. 13). However, whatever suspicion there was did not deter the establishment of Women’s Studies programs. Within the decade of the 70s alone, according to Ginsberg, 300 such programs were founded in the United States (p. 15), followed by an even greater proliferation in the 1980s. Clearly, if there was opposition to the politicizing of university study, it was feeble and ineffectual.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Every contributor to the book makes clear that women’s studies was never simply about adding women’s lives and experiences to the traditional disciplines. It was always interventionist and partisan, always about female grievance and male guilt (p. 92). Philosophy professor Paula Rothenberg explains that “At the heart of Women’s Studies and framing the perspective from which it proceeds was the critical insight that ‘the personal is political’” (p. 69). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Women’s Studies director Ann Russo describes her teaching in a somewhat garbled manner: “I struggle in my classes to cultivate a sustained and simultaneous focus on the forces that shape how privilege, access, and power shape identities and experiences of oppression and resistance, as well as complicity in others’ oppression” (p. 135). This was typical academic mumbo-jumbo, but it’s meaning is clear enough. The primary subject of women’s studies was the oppression of women and women’s complicity in the oppression of other women.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">As women’s studies developed, it did not become more nuanced in its account of oppressors and oppressed. Instead, it simply added more categories of oppression. According to sociologist Judith Lorber, “Feminism has moved from a focus on women’s oppression to recognition of the intersectionality of gender, social class, racial, ethnic, and other statuses that create the conditions of complex inequality” (p. 159). Heterosexual white men were always permanently outside the circle of concern and empathy. All human beings were assessed and understood in terms of their raced, sexed, gendered, and classed selves.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">According to sociologist Nancy Naples, women’s studies classes were primarily intended to teach students to see themselves as structurally oppressed, using such methods as “journal writing, autobiographical essays, and oral histories of family and community members” in order “to explore how processes of oppression often hidden from view shaped their personal lives” (203). Women who entered the women’s studies classroom not seeing themselves as victims were to be trained to think differently. Women’s Studies was never about drawing one’s own conclusions from the material presented; it was about accepting and adhering to a dogma. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">And what a dogma it was. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In one of the book’s chapters, titled “Women Studies: The Early Years,” the afore-mentioned Paula Rothenberg includes a detailed description of the feminist philosophy course she designed at William Paterson University in New Jersey sometime in the early 1970s; it provides a fascinating window on the general worldview of feminists in academia. </span></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDp2lrC2_UwlXPmNal43ec_7BpQsBTobjaZCTcYv6ZXjtqG2jNPFKwgABKaCp3Uo6iWvtOStSBxNe-qeEGAuKPxCCLgPPIDIN-ju3sGcW7jvYwjbJgA-ydjxtjO_KLixrfbk7Buxs9MDRIGg9NfLloaDoUOS-MkaqPMY1oSv5MoEqwsnS0Ke3AAs13Dg/s600/FF2-030%20p12%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="414" data-original-width="600" height="138" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDp2lrC2_UwlXPmNal43ec_7BpQsBTobjaZCTcYv6ZXjtqG2jNPFKwgABKaCp3Uo6iWvtOStSBxNe-qeEGAuKPxCCLgPPIDIN-ju3sGcW7jvYwjbJgA-ydjxtjO_KLixrfbk7Buxs9MDRIGg9NfLloaDoUOS-MkaqPMY1oSv5MoEqwsnS0Ke3AAs13Dg/w200-h138/FF2-030%20p12%20b.png" width="200" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Paula Rothenberg</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Rothenberg is a good representative of the feminist academy. She was an acknowledged thought leader, a respected philosophy professor for 37 years, and the author of many mainstream publications. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: arial;">With Alison Jaggar, also an American feminist philosopher, Rothenberg co-authored one of the first women’s studies textbooks, </span><span style="font-family: arial;">an anthology titled Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations Between Women and Men. The book went through three editions and was taught in many classrooms. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">She also collected a series of essays in an anthology called White Privilege. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Published in 2004, the book demonstrated her ability to recognize significant feminist trends. Critical race theory, much discussed today, was alive and well in academia 20 years ago and more.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In Rothenberg’s essay on the evolution of American Women’s Studies, she, like others, stressed the activist focus of Women’s Studies, pointing out that “The line between intellectual and political work was virtually seamless” and, again, that “The line between Women’s Studies as an academic department and the Women’s Center and the Women’s Collective was very fine—I don’t think any of us would have been able to say where one ended and the other began.” Clearly, the courses were never primarily about knowledge; always about creating foot soldiers for the social justice feminist movement. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Rothenberg provides a list of the assigned texts for her first course, which makes for eye-opening reading.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Anyone who still thinks that women’s studies started out with the moderate aim of introducing women’s history perspectives into a primarily male educational environment will be quickly disabused of that false idea by a glance at the crudely reductionist, anti-scientific, intemperate, hate-filled, agit-prop theories that were part of the core curriculum. These were clearly texts of propaganda. </span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilVGQZX7idmZy8R-Hvqq1pHzvBvOiCzuPh_GTYYvacMdaXSiQbv8GtEYVhu4cPpRuKzUmRXEzK8Bn-0UcRZbCqi-tOm8oY05XdDvnPz79oVH31NmOq319FaZ_vrOJnwLjcRm8Tg-rtr9wgq5V0YYhNaGxSUMR6lHIql5zgXU9roXCTMNoN_XY3Tv7Iyg/s1800/FF2-030%20p13.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1800" data-original-width="1200" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilVGQZX7idmZy8R-Hvqq1pHzvBvOiCzuPh_GTYYvacMdaXSiQbv8GtEYVhu4cPpRuKzUmRXEzK8Bn-0UcRZbCqi-tOm8oY05XdDvnPz79oVH31NmOq319FaZ_vrOJnwLjcRm8Tg-rtr9wgq5V0YYhNaGxSUMR6lHIql5zgXU9roXCTMNoN_XY3Tv7Iyg/w133-h200/FF2-030%20p13.png" width="133" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>Like most of Second Wave feminism, the course was heavily Marxist in its orientation. Required reading included Frederick Engels’ 1884 The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which argued that the patriarchal family and private property were intertwined elements at the core of women’s oppression. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Building on that Communist chestnut, Eli Zaretsky’s book Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life made classic Marxist arguments about the nuclear family as the oppressive lynchpin of capitalism, while Evelyn Reed’s “Is Biology Woman’s Destiny,” originally published in the journal International Socialist Review in 1971, argued the social constructionist position that women’s place in society was in no way natural but was “exclusively the result of manmade institutions and laws in class-divided patriarchal society.” </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Nowhere in the assigned readings can one find any defense of capitalism or of women’s place in the family. Nowhere is it suggested that male and female sex roles developed from the exigencies of human survival. Nowhere is it suggested that loving a man and raising children with him are what many normal women desire. Nowhere is it suggested that male contributions to society should be seriously acknowledged, even celebrated. Readings ranged from left to far left, with nothing allowed to distract from the radical socialist-feminist ideological slant. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The course even had a preposterous section on female sexuality that established every element of the radical feminist thesis that male sexuality is degrading and exploitative, and female sexuality “constructed” (the approved feminist term) through violence and dehumanization. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">This section included Susan Lydon’s 1970 essay “The Politics of Orgasm,” which argued that women’s sexuality was “defined by men to benefit men,” and Susan Griffin’s 1971 article “Rape: the All-American Crime,” which alleged that rape was the most frequently committed violent crime in America, and that it was an act of mass terrorism, condoned by society, by which powerful men subjugated women and less powerful men.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Lucy Komisar’s 1970 article “Violence and the Masculine Mystique” continued to hammer away at the significance of rape by alleging that “The ultimate proof of manhood is sexual violence.”</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Sidney Abbot’s “Sappho was a Right on Woman” completed the attack on heterosexuality by advocating lesbianism for young women who reject the “passivity, ignorance, docility, virtue and ineffectuality” that allegedly constituted femininity. Only by becoming a lesbian, according to the author, could a woman hope to be “a whole human being.”</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The course also included a section on the particular experiences of black women, who were doubly dehumanized in a society both racist and sexist: Frances Beal’s essay “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female” advanced the intersectionality of black womanhood.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">We see here all the elements of feminism that flowered in the 1980, ‘90s and beyond: the emphasis was anti-western, anti-family, anti-white, pro-Marxist, anti-heterosexual, pro-lesbian, rape-obsessed, and above all anti-male. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In the introduction to the volume, editor Alice Ginsberg had scoffed at conservative Christian Pat Robertson’s description of academic feminism, but it turned out that Robertson was not wrong: “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians” (qtd. on p. 6). With the exception of the witchcraft, every facet named by Robertson is clearly on display in Rothenberg’s syllabus.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Striking in Rothenberg’s description of the establishment of women’s studies is how very little criticism or resistance it encountered. Far from what we might have expected from a traditional male-dominated enterprise, there was no concerted pushback. Male academics did not make it difficult for women to build their bastions of male-blaming, female-supremacist knowledge-production. They did not object to the politicization of higher learning or the importation of untested and untestable theories into the domain of serious knowledge. </span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZpKLzOqpsdprqrgOWNk18Cd-cCUAZvx8kZkUG0e3AD8SWszreUxJEFwSdKdZNK5B6EJvFoCPWABmX8aHQeYeP1Q5NHtJVAQp5qeZF4eJHE_py0-WnKzAHsorN6srmy2fW1jSolyAe_wQLUNWxo7Tx65Am_q6sRDuyqylvdf2dkQuGwgmTHpL5XGVwfw/s1138/FF-030%20Nudity%20is%20gods%20creation%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1138" data-original-width="924" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZpKLzOqpsdprqrgOWNk18Cd-cCUAZvx8kZkUG0e3AD8SWszreUxJEFwSdKdZNK5B6EJvFoCPWABmX8aHQeYeP1Q5NHtJVAQp5qeZF4eJHE_py0-WnKzAHsorN6srmy2fW1jSolyAe_wQLUNWxo7Tx65Am_q6sRDuyqylvdf2dkQuGwgmTHpL5XGVwfw/w163-h200/FF-030%20Nudity%20is%20gods%20creation%20b.png" width="163" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><br /></span></div>On the contrary, faculty welcomed the politicization and ideological contamination of academia. As Rothenberg described it, “Women’s studies grew out of the extraordinary activism and energy of the Women’s Liberation Movement” of the late 1960s. Within a few years, a decade at most, feminism went from being a fringe social movement to a major part of many elite universities in North America, where tens of thousands of students were affected by it by every year. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Moreover, contributors to the volume make clear that feminist so-called “scholarship” was explicitly intended to provide front-line activists with frameworks and manufactured data for their activism. Feminist activists and so-called scholars worked hand in hand. Rothenberg quotes feminist Catherine Stimpson to the effect that “Feminists offered scholars an agenda for research, while scholars provided activists a theoretical framework and data to form the basis for social policy and progress” (p, 71). In other words, the activists made clear the issues and perspectives academics should explore, and the academics provided the activists with a sheen of academic legitimacy to bolster their arguments about male violence, rape culture, the pay gap, white privilege, and so on. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: arial;">With little debate and even less protest, academia surrendered to feminist dogmatism. </span><span style="font-family: arial;">The rest, as they say, is history. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> Janice Fiamengo</span></div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-71475003595779356052023-05-07T06:54:00.003-04:002023-05-07T06:54:53.083-04:00Susan Brownmiller on Rape and Male Power - Janice Fiamengo<div>The one thing genuinely new about Second Wave Feminism is its extensive theory of rape, rape not as an individual crime but as the paradigmatic expression of male power. Though she alone did not invent the theory, American feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller gave it influential expression in her repulsive 1975 tract Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape. </div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghnA61FSGxvpEUUfV7fk1FGl2r0Kx4CaxaZTR-6J6tzg2Ww_KEIiV2rPFXWr2SV2FYXbsahvxOx650lW1Xr0UOSl9Uy1Jo7Cig8vlKI-4eFaTkAWsJLIff1yWsv4uSQVbFSnk6d1xfH0EBkQmClPPJjHoPe7kNyd-fbsd3Ux_WqXqrl-dMG5ifp-3t_g/s1624/TFF-029%20Brownmiller%20SH%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1077" data-original-width="1624" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghnA61FSGxvpEUUfV7fk1FGl2r0Kx4CaxaZTR-6J6tzg2Ww_KEIiV2rPFXWr2SV2FYXbsahvxOx650lW1Xr0UOSl9Uy1Jo7Cig8vlKI-4eFaTkAWsJLIff1yWsv4uSQVbFSnk6d1xfH0EBkQmClPPJjHoPe7kNyd-fbsd3Ux_WqXqrl-dMG5ifp-3t_g/w400-h265/TFF-029%20Brownmiller%20SH%20b.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Susan Brownmiller</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>“I wrote this book because I am a woman who changed her mind about rape” (9). So wrote Brownmiller in a “Personal Statement” she placed at the beginning of her book. </div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div>In this preface, Brownmiller described a shattering awakening and profound self-transformation that occurred when “I finally confronted my own fears, my own past, my own intellectual defenses” (p. 9). Analyzing the experience as a spiritual rebirth, Brownmiller explained that through listening to her “sisters in feminism,” she gained a new vision of male-female relations. Needless to say, it was not a positive one. Against Our Will records in detail her nightmarish revelation. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBMZwADpOAScxJa5EL7NZ5_8Pvv_FmsAfFFJXyb92gU0ikGIehJwOO23B-0jSIicNANSiOTFgEYucFdRTS_tZtWF5H5Sp2Y_lA8a66L0oGsbORpmzAq6bv_xUvjrxT-V8gUJM8ofshvAXBtp6PsrjtgqwlAQz8USaJbcyL58p1h_IlYgMjUdq9K5Q3dA/s1011/TFF-029%20p02.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1011" data-original-width="640" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBMZwADpOAScxJa5EL7NZ5_8Pvv_FmsAfFFJXyb92gU0ikGIehJwOO23B-0jSIicNANSiOTFgEYucFdRTS_tZtWF5H5Sp2Y_lA8a66L0oGsbORpmzAq6bv_xUvjrxT-V8gUJM8ofshvAXBtp6PsrjtgqwlAQz8USaJbcyL58p1h_IlYgMjUdq9K5Q3dA/w127-h200/TFF-029%20p02.png" width="127" /></a></div><br /><div>Brownmiller went from seeing rape as a crime condemned by society and committed by aberrant individuals, to seeing it as a widely-accepted practice and the ultimate means of patriarchal control. “[Rape] is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear” (p. 15), she insisted. For Brownmiller, there was nothing deviant about men who commit rape; they are simply acting out the desires and beliefs of most men (see p. 312). </div><div><br /></div><div>Never providing any numbers, she simply repeated that rape was what men do because they can and believe it to be their right—the right “to gain access to the female body” (see p. 392). She compared rapists to the Myrmidons of Greek legend, those soldiers the warrior Achilles used as “hired henchmen in battle” and “effective agents of terror” (209). Ordinary rapists, according to Brownmiller, “in a very real sense perform a Myrmidon function for all men in our society” (209).</div><div><br /></div><div>According to Brownmiller, “That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool [that is, the penis] must be held in awe for it may turn to weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent” (p. 209). </div><div><br /></div><div>Brownmiller believed that all men benefit from the existence of rape because, she assumed, all men enjoy dominance and take advantage of women’s fear. No surveys, no psychological studies, not even any reasoning processes were applied to support this conclusion. The minority of men who rape simply came to stand in for all men. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2ADUeHB0bsTtvK6t0Ja6q-iWUXQBRQMP--Bzh4ub5kbkePjQqM2eLtN1YZNiE6Ci84alWWrAQvaHAAbvj4UPlHAxCkxvUgc4B0o0B1wQNp6qW0hbIBLTNI479Xx_pDun2zoAN2N15ivs7PwS2M2cVvAEB7Nu5EWttt-3bpCdS5S8YzxC9eB7gdptACw/s700/TFF-029%20p05%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="700" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2ADUeHB0bsTtvK6t0Ja6q-iWUXQBRQMP--Bzh4ub5kbkePjQqM2eLtN1YZNiE6Ci84alWWrAQvaHAAbvj4UPlHAxCkxvUgc4B0o0B1wQNp6qW0hbIBLTNI479Xx_pDun2zoAN2N15ivs7PwS2M2cVvAEB7Nu5EWttt-3bpCdS5S8YzxC9eB7gdptACw/w400-h229/TFF-029%20p05%20b.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>If this sounds like a thoroughly ideological proposition based on an anti-male contempt so profound it never occurred to Brownmiller to prove it or test it against alternative hypotheses, that’s because it was, and it is truly shocking that so many reviewers never subjected Brownmiller’s risibly biased arguments to the interrogation they deserved. Brownmiller’s book was received with many positive reviews and was chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the Outstanding Books of the Year.</div><div><br /></div><div>Few took public issue with Brownmiller’s many unsupported assertions and tendentious conclusions. In her first chapter, she declared that from the beginning of recorded history, men had trouble taking rape seriously as a crime against a woman’s person. She admitted that from 1275 onward, rape was dealt with harshly, punishable in England according to the Second Statute of Westminster by death—but this fact hardly lessened her expressed certainty that the law did not care about women’s injuries. Lawmakers’ understandable worry about the possibility of a man being wrongly put to death—because a woman lied or was mistaken—she took as clear proof of male scorn for “victims.”</div><div><br /></div><div>Two substantial chapters on rape in war and times of crisis supported Brownmiller’s claim that “War provides men with the perfect psychologic backdrop to give vent to their contempt for women” (p. 32). In other words, war allowed men to do what they wanted but normally could not. The fact that rape was made illegal and punishable by death or imprisonment under Article 120 of the American Code of Military Justice was a mere technicality for her. </div><div><br /></div><div>That war is about men killing other men—and often torturing and mutilating them horribly—did not weaken Brownmiller’s belief that it is exclusively women’s bodily integrity that men choose to violate. </div><div><br /></div><div>From this point on, it is difficult not to notice how Brownmiller’s anger overshadows her ability to reason. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCY8D_XFBA5vY051IPlnoKPLCOUCO8nYjMn68lHYnVMotewBzsa5Er1fClGVpVe2hBQ3jy-fPOoYRR8J3EMYc2ppQghIDuKFpxtQO4QgGpl1bPYLoVgvZ3yyUfWQddp5xHuFpdG_8zZ9CB2iP_QbFO7mVJyWqanWiDHsmuCdK6cjqrE5GCAr_NMuYAvA/s700/TFF-029%20p07.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="700" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCY8D_XFBA5vY051IPlnoKPLCOUCO8nYjMn68lHYnVMotewBzsa5Er1fClGVpVe2hBQ3jy-fPOoYRR8J3EMYc2ppQghIDuKFpxtQO4QgGpl1bPYLoVgvZ3yyUfWQddp5xHuFpdG_8zZ9CB2iP_QbFO7mVJyWqanWiDHsmuCdK6cjqrE5GCAr_NMuYAvA/w400-h240/TFF-029%20p07.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div>She included, for example, a substantial section about wartime propaganda during the First World War in which she made much of the fact that Belgium was represented in British war propaganda as a woman raped by the armies of Germany. </div><div><br /></div><div>She didn’t seem to care that the propaganda provided evidence to oppose her thesis. It wasn’t that most men had contempt for women, but that many men were in fact willing to risk their lives in war, and to die by the hundreds of thousands, in order to attempt to save women. </div><div><br /></div><div>Expressions of public horror at the use of rape in war, and even the metaphorization of rape as a symbol of the worst possible atrocity, as in the phrase “The Rape of Nanking” (p. 57)—these seemed not to decrease Brownmiller’s confidence that rape was an accepted, even glorified, practice. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Moreover, the horrific brutalization of men in war and the enormous psychological toll on men of war conditions were never once mentioned as factors requiring serious consideration in any study of wartime rape. In Brownmiller’s view, men simply were perpetrators of harm, never protectors and almost never suffering agents deserving of empathy. Brownmiller wrote as a declared leftist who had broken with her Communist mentors on this particular issue. </div><div><br /></div><div>She mentions in the book, for example, her intellectual debt to well-known American Marxist historian Dr. Herbert Aptheker, from whom she took classes in American history. As a young Communist, she had been taught to see rape accusations by white women against black men as a weapon of racism; she had even believed that as a white woman, she should not object to black men’s sexualized behavior, believing she must “bear the white man’s burden of making amends for Southern racism” (p. 248). But no longer. </div><div><br /></div><div>In a chapter on interracial rape, Brownmiller resolved the tension between her Communist-inspired empathy for black men and her feminist-inspired defense of white female accusers by shifting the burden of guilt from white women who accused black men to the white men who allegedly coerced white women to lie and/or created the conditions by which black men felt compelled to rape. “We white women did not dangle ourselves yet everything the black man has been exposed to would lead him to this conclusion, and then to action, in imitation of the white man who raped ‘his’ woman” (p. 253). </div><div><br /></div><div>White women really were raped by black men, Brownmiller assertted, but they were raped because white men had raped black women, and had inspired justified though misdirected rage in black men. In Brownmiller’s convoluted rationalizations, we see clearly the strained negotiations necessary at the so-called “intersection” of race and gender ideologies—and the inevitable preference to blame white men whenever possible. Brownmiller ultimately called for solidarity between blacks and white women in recognition of their alleged mutual victimization by their white male enemy. “Rape is to women as lynching was to blacks” (p. 254), she said, and she claimed that “The mythified spectre of the black man as rapist […] must be understood as a control mechanism against the freedom, mobility and aspirations of all women, white and black” (p. 255). In other words, white men created a bogey-man of the black rapist in order to maintain white male power.</div><div><br /></div><div>A chapter on prison rape amplified the glaring biases in Brownmiller’s intersectional feminist ideology. Having just discussed interracial rape, she went on to report that the vast majority of men raped in a Philadelphia prison, according to a recent study, were white men raped by black men, but she did not allow this fact to complicate her anti-white perspective.</div><div><br /></div><div>Though recognizing the frequency and brutality of prison rape, she doggedly continued to see rape exclusively as an act of contempt against women. And even after admitting the existence of female-on-female sexual assaults in prisons and other institutional settings, Brownmiller refused to alter her male-perpetrator paradigm. </div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps the best example of blinkered ideological certainty occurs when Brownmiller discussed the mythologization of rapists in history. She explained that the original Bluebeard, the French nobleman Gilles de Rais, was infamous in his time for abducting, raping and murdering between forty and one hundred male youths (p. 292). As she noted, Bluebeard is known today as a man who killed seven wives, not as a sex-murderer of small boys. </div><div><br /></div><div>She also mentioned American serial killer Dean Allen Corll who, with two disciples in the early 1970s, abducted at least twenty-eight teenaged boys who were then tortured, raped, and murdered. Corll’s name, she noted, has been essentially purged from popular memory. </div><div><br /></div><div>But so committed was Brownmiller to her theory of rape as an expression of male sexualized contempt for women that she speculated that the public forgetting of the sex-murders of boys occurred because ordinary men like to identify with rapists of women—that they get a sexual thrill from it—and cannot identify with a man who raped, tortured, and murdered boys. Here are her words: “Corll raped and killed his own kind, and what heterosexual man with a rich, imaginative, socially acceptable fantasy life could safely identify with Corll without at the height of his fantasy slipping a little and becoming for one dread instant that cringing, whimpering naked lad manacled wrist and foot to the makeshift wooden torture board? What a turnoff that would be! What a short circuit of the power lines!” (293). The naked hatred for male being could not be clearer. </div><div><br /></div><div>The simpler explanation for lack of public interest in boys’ deaths would be that few people care much about harms to boys, but this never seemed to occur to Brownmiller. In true misandrist style, she herself seemed immediately to forget the stories she reported of male vulnerability and suffering, always returning to her thesis about the abuse of women. Just a few pages after the discussion of serial killer Dean Corll, she stated once again that “To talk about rape, even with nervous laughter, is to acknowledge a woman’s special victim status. We hear the whispers when we are children: girls get raped. Not boys” (p. 309). </div><div><br /></div><div>For Brownmiller, in the tried-and-true tradition of feminist theorizing, women were without stain, men without redeeming qualities. Women played no active role in the history she recounted, and one day—when at last men’s power is overthrown—a new dawn will bring an end to all rape, all abuse, and all injustice. At one point in the book, Brownmiller admitted that women do harbor well-documented and much-discussed fantasies of sexual masochism, including rape fantasies, but she insisted that this was so because men had forced such fantasies onto women (p. 316-317), and she was confident that when they could at last, women would develop better “sexual daydreams” (p. 323), as she called them, ones that would be, “non-exploitative, non-sadomasochistic, non-power-driven” (p. 324)—in other words, not perhaps very sexy at all. Women, according to Brownmiller, never wanted to “humiliate and degrade” (p. 379); only the male psyche seeks the degradation of the other.</div><div><br /></div><div>Of all the repellant and defamatory theories feminists have promulgated about men over the years, Brownmiller’s may well be the worst, contaminating at the root the male-female pair bond and charging every man with complicity in rape ideology. Because she refused to accept in theory—even while admitting in fact!—that men could be victims and women perpetrators, Brownmiller decisively set the terms for all that is most unfair and demonizing in the feminist construct of male sexual guilt. And, with her call for “an overhaul of present laws and a fresh approach to sexual assault legislation” (p. 386), she paved the way for radical changes to law and policy, in which society and police must #BelieveWomen, in which a mere accusation can lead to severe punishment, and in which men’s avenues of legal defense are continually reduced. The malign accusations of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon built on the foundation Brownmiller had built.</div><div><br /></div><div>Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape is a collection of anti-male slanders designed to permanently stigmatize men at the deep heart of their masculinity. The only thing more shocking than Brownmiller’s preposterous claims was the credulity of the intellectuals and pundits who accepted, praised, and promoted them. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> Janice Fiamengo</div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-6890553114082776302023-05-07T06:39:00.001-04:002023-05-07T06:39:16.231-04:00Fakery, Posing, and Madness, Feminism Comes of Age in the 1960s - Janice Fiamengo<div>Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Kate Millett essentially made 1960s feminism. They accepted and amplified Simone De Beauvoir’s assertions about a patriarchy that subjugated women and privileged men. Such a conception necessarily dehumanized men and promoted revolutionary anger.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjddF91iEynvuq2QTUDvSjd59Au0_OL4alw8HTH1nYDde4YDuVXw87-7PD0Bhc1IPXS7SkrWqtWycbxD4yg0fdphX2n52pPq2n3QA-MnTWA9aRpcnz47tG3rUu6W2S6sn45GO4ALVmMLcXw-EcKAM-iKVKK6fTFOLwptYYDvUcOLAQlShAA3QepzHmUVg/s1100/FF2-028%20%20p01%20Frieden%20et%20al.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="619" data-original-width="1100" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjddF91iEynvuq2QTUDvSjd59Au0_OL4alw8HTH1nYDde4YDuVXw87-7PD0Bhc1IPXS7SkrWqtWycbxD4yg0fdphX2n52pPq2n3QA-MnTWA9aRpcnz47tG3rUu6W2S6sn45GO4ALVmMLcXw-EcKAM-iKVKK6fTFOLwptYYDvUcOLAQlShAA3QepzHmUVg/s320/FF2-028%20%20p01%20Frieden%20et%20al.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>We have seen that far from being a new phenomenon, feminism was already a force to be reckoned with by the mid-twentieth century. </div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div>It had flexed its power at the turn of the century in winning women’s political rights. It had infiltrated international organizations such as the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations. Its narratives of female victimization and male sexual brutality were becoming more widely accepted. </div><div><br /></div><div>By the 1950s, the time was ripe for a general assault on traditional mores in America. Criticisms of capitalism and consumer culture were being developed in American universities by New Left academics such as political theorist Herbert Marcuse and sociologist Charles Wright Mills.</div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCur_-tGDRHXAKuxtFsFooAwZudjUZyY7-Lh-pnWUHoca5NoEkH1QA-uAqVXaTeoREXGAd-Mke-k8Y-vuymtBnyjhj3sbZWkNBR07Y5FMPwPPiCbGX_rC_XsCTtmpf0n7Z1yIBExY0E24vIWY0oQAgl6v6bok76pedmWTKkb6TzrQ6uZfthe9YEqOxQg/s768/FF2-028%20%20p03%20Marcuse.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="757" data-original-width="768" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCur_-tGDRHXAKuxtFsFooAwZudjUZyY7-Lh-pnWUHoca5NoEkH1QA-uAqVXaTeoREXGAd-Mke-k8Y-vuymtBnyjhj3sbZWkNBR07Y5FMPwPPiCbGX_rC_XsCTtmpf0n7Z1yIBExY0E24vIWY0oQAgl6v6bok76pedmWTKkb6TzrQ6uZfthe9YEqOxQg/w200-h197/FF2-028%20%20p03%20Marcuse.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Herbert Marcuse</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>The major themes of feminism— “centuries of oppression” and “gender as a social construct”—had been given an intellectual gloss in the resentful treatises of English novelist Virginia Woolf and Parisian existentialist Simone De Beauvoir. </div><div><br /></div><div>Enter three highly-educated American women who would translate feminist theory into popular narratives of rebellion that led to the Take Back the Night marches and the abortion advocacy that were to characterize feminism’s so-called Second Wave. These three authors gained so much national and international acclaim that the truth of their words, or lack thereof, hardly mattered.</div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgq9aBCcWvco1agZSHr64nDoiAatafSFUvGOnOICl_O0GFq7YRz-u96u5kysT8p0rVwWQWHDM1Y_sNf1B4TkG8arAn1ZhTnPgjMBU5Xyr3G2Dhc9xbjXxbTbGIZy24zL77x_zQOemvjiiMn_bFRz2Me_av12JiWviqp7eBX7xXVvsMtlylwx9y0lSObg/s919/FF2-028%20%20p08%20Friedan.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="689" data-original-width="919" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgq9aBCcWvco1agZSHr64nDoiAatafSFUvGOnOICl_O0GFq7YRz-u96u5kysT8p0rVwWQWHDM1Y_sNf1B4TkG8arAn1ZhTnPgjMBU5Xyr3G2Dhc9xbjXxbTbGIZy24zL77x_zQOemvjiiMn_bFRz2Me_av12JiWviqp7eBX7xXVvsMtlylwx9y0lSObg/w200-h150/FF2-028%20%20p08%20Friedan.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Betty Friedan</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>Published in 1963, Betty Friedan’s blockbuster The Feminine Mystique was an elaborate fabrication dressed up as Friedan’s personal story. Friedan (1921-2006) complained in the book that after gaining the vote and professional opportunities, American women had been forced back into domesticity by a propaganda campaign of unmatched ferocity. The feminine mystique, as she called it, allegedly told women that their only possible destiny was “the career of wife-mother-homemaker” (p. 260). “Housework, washing dishes, [and] diaper-changing had to be dressed up by the new mystique to become equal to splitting atoms [and] penetrating outer space” (p. 284).</div><div><br /></div><div>Yet despite authoritative sounding pronouncements by psychiatrists and sociologists and women’s magazines, it wasn’t working, Friedan claimed, not for countless women living lives of quiet desperation. They were literally countless because Friedan never attempted to count them, simply asserting that they were everywhere: women bored, frustrated, and lost, she said, possessed by a deep yearning for something more. Friedan called their discontent “the problem that has no name” (p. 58), and to emphasize its severity, she wrote of a “high incidence of emotional breakdown and suicide among women in their twenties and thirties” (p. 22), though, again, she didn’t give readers any numbers, making it impossible to know how many women were actually driven to end their lives by the experience of greater prosperity and security than had ever existed before. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6-ktsy9_r2ABvnB1J8opROgiOaBv_PyMSvD1GmN9ax5PHU8w5y4KdM2QFVi3K-1vHYYduefiez51ZJzcidaJhl_sHI54a2sYuETdMkqejamWH2FLcHxl-FTWRjXG2SA4NM6ULsfL5Q6aPaBS4ouYg_DnZ-qXfeCIHQwl5o4rGEVWn69zMC0WTYu7slQ/s500/FF2-028%20%20p06%20Feminine%20mystique.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6-ktsy9_r2ABvnB1J8opROgiOaBv_PyMSvD1GmN9ax5PHU8w5y4KdM2QFVi3K-1vHYYduefiez51ZJzcidaJhl_sHI54a2sYuETdMkqejamWH2FLcHxl-FTWRjXG2SA4NM6ULsfL5Q6aPaBS4ouYg_DnZ-qXfeCIHQwl5o4rGEVWn69zMC0WTYu7slQ/w200-h200/FF2-028%20%20p06%20Feminine%20mystique.png" width="200" /></a></div><br /><div>Friedan scoffed at those who were skeptical of her thesis. One could be unhappy even in the midst of plenty, she stressed, telling readers that the suburban woman’s home was “in reality a comfortable concentration camp” in which women were “suffering a slow death of mind and spirit” (p. 369). Only a “self-chosen purpose” (p. 372)—in other words, a career outside the home and one’s children raised by others—could save these suffering suburbanites.</div><div><br /></div><div>Friedan claimed to know what she was writing about because she had lived it. She claimed that her then-boyfriend had persuaded her years earlier to give up her PhD scholarship and planned career. As a result, she said, “For years afterward, I could not read a word of the science that once I had thought of as my future life’s work; the reminder of its loss was too painful” (p. 68). She found herself trapped in the domestic dead-end of suburbia like all those other female POWs: “I married, had children, lived according to the feminine mystique as a suburban housewife. But still the question haunted me. I could sense no purpose in my life” (pp. 68-69). </div><div><br /></div><div>Some of us might be less than moved by Friedan’s portrait of alleged despair. Was it really so terrible to be, as she said, raising her children and working part-time as a magazine writer? Friedan’s entire book rested on the preposterous idea that men’s work lives, in contrast, were deeply fulfilling. </div><div><br /></div><div>It turns out, however, that Friedan’s self-description was a fabrication. Friedan was never a housewife, and wasn’t for a moment captivated by the feminine mystique or haunted by a sense of lost purpose. </div><div><br /></div><div>She was, as her admiring biographer Daniel Horowitz has amply documented, a Communist organizer and paid propagandist, committed to labor agitation and to fomenting radicalism amongst American women. Her husband Carl allegedly complained (according to David Horowitz, no relationship to Daniel) that she never stayed at home with their children and left all the housework to their maid. So the entirety of her personal howl of rage was based on a fib. </div><div><br /></div><div>Friedan didn’t want to admit that she was a Communist; so she invented a housewife persona and a problem that couldn’t be proved or disproved in order to promote the destabilization of one of the most high-functioning, productive, and dynamic societies that had ever existed. That it was ready to be destabilized tells us something about the perils of prosperity and the power of comfortable, discontented women. Friedan went on a few years later, in 1966, to co-found the National Organization for Women (NOW), a pro-abortion feminist lobby group. A prickly, often-unpleasant personality, she never confessed to her lie.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the same year that The Feminine Mystique was exploding like a red bomb, another woman, Gloria Steinem (b. 1934), was crafting her own compelling story—also not entirely accurate—about the plight of young women in an allegedly predatory world. Almost none of the women profiled in Steinem’s story were bored housewives. They were “Bunnies” working at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club in New York City, one of a number of such clubs that Hefner was marketing mainly to middle-aged businessmen wanting to be served drinks by pretty girls dressed in tight outfits and bunny ears. </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgupcxLKeiCXgcQuOZhtizEB-iMOz4h8up3uJWOvHxf7_rKtfJu6CKZYPIwlJKaZjRZFbhm3JLtRadsRfCcqf0BPJUoTGpwbQRZ_adOlJWy_eQmGhmhV7X_ATvnwzydo0YTjWfgjAbBSxWQO79L7e6b2SBnbF8fEsF65QrrAm4LRYub84rYfLhzSaBSoA/s624/FF2-028%20%20p12%20Steinem%20bunny.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="624" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgupcxLKeiCXgcQuOZhtizEB-iMOz4h8up3uJWOvHxf7_rKtfJu6CKZYPIwlJKaZjRZFbhm3JLtRadsRfCcqf0BPJUoTGpwbQRZ_adOlJWy_eQmGhmhV7X_ATvnwzydo0YTjWfgjAbBSxWQO79L7e6b2SBnbF8fEsF65QrrAm4LRYub84rYfLhzSaBSoA/s320/FF2-028%20%20p12%20Steinem%20bunny.png" width="256" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gloria Steinem<br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>Steinem, like Friedan a graduate of the illustrious Smith College though more than a decade younger than Friedan, assumed the name Marie Catherine Ochs and subtracted four years from her age to become a 24-year-old server at the Playboy Club for about 3 weeks. The exposé that she wrote was published as “A Bunny’s Tale,” (retitled later by Steinem as “I Was a Playboy Bunny,” reprinted in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions), a long double feature in Show magazine.</div><div><br /></div><div>Steinem had clearly hoped, and expected, to discover horrors at the Playboy Club, women pressured to have sex with club members, women verbally abused by misogynistic men. But her experience was quite mundane. The work was highly regulated, as one would expect for a position in which image was everything, and the shifts were exhausting, long hours spent on painful, swelling feet in a too-tight outfit, regulation 3-inch heels, and a stuffed bodice. But there was no sex with customers—customers weren’t even allowed to touch the “girls”—and aside from offers of dates from the mostly paunchy and balding club members, there was nothing unpleasant. The pay was never as good as advertised, and there were demerit points for having a tear in one’s stockings or a bedraggled puff tail, but about the worst that could be said of the job was that it was no more glamorous than waitressing.</div><div><br /></div><div>Nevertheless, Steinem reported on the job as if there were horrors, telling readers how dehumanizing it was, for example, to have to memorize scripted phrases (“Good evening, sir, I am your Bunny, Marie. May I see the member’s key, please?” and so on). And this became her running theme: that she was treated as an object little better than a prostitute. One evening while working in the coat check, she noted that “There were a few customers, a very few […] who looked at us not as objects but […] as if we might be human beings” (Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, p. 58), and while walking home one night, she exchanged a glance with a high-class prostitute and noted that “Of the two of us, she seemed the more honest” (p. 59). The self-pity was hidden behind the allegedly searing insight. </div><div><br /></div><div>Ultimately, what Steinem decided to emphasize about the story—and the meaning it’s been given ever since—was that the techniques taught and the interactions between male customers and female servers were archetypal of male-female relations as a whole: as she said, “All women are Bunnies.” This was a classic feminist move: take one group of women’s experiences, paint them as entirely negative (and with no context), and claim them as true of all women. According to Steinem, all women were taught to please men, were given lines to learn, were supposed to make men feel listened to, had to wear degrading outfits, and were essentially props to male self esteem. </div><div><br /></div><div>That these weren’t the reality of Steinem’s life mattered not at all. That men came to the Playboy Club precisely because it offered a fantasy different from the rest of their humdrum businessmen’s lives, in which they were mostly undesired and un-titillated, also didn’t matter. Offered as a candid snapshot of women’s reality, the article was in fact a piece of propaganda as carefully fashioned as the Bunnies themselves.</div><div><br /></div><div>Steinem went on to have a long public career as America’s best-known feminist, founder of Ms Magazine and spokesperson for many lobby groups. She is credited with popularizing the feminist slogan, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” In a 1982 essay on black American novelist Alice Walker, she demonstrated that her feminism was inclusive of racist caricature, quoting with approval Walker’s claim that “Since white men lived by raping the earth and then by threatening us all with the bomb—why not let them die by it?” (Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, p. 307). Steinem ended the article by assuring readers that “I think we can trust Alice Walker to know us. And we can change for the better if we know her” (p. 310). Genocidal rage against white men was ok with Steinem. </div><div>But she was good-looking and photogenic, and despite the poisonous radicalism of many of her ideas, she managed to make feminism seem attractive and reasonable—and she made a good career out of that. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuuBItpk4w3EdnS8SIOqCRUcdZD6MCzoeqMZ3SBw_llnGru-zkVHT8ygGJO8JB-fVNUJrSsVYDy1IKmDSCd0bcNo3GD6GcoCuQwpvtfsR_hPRRLih1oqWtbI70IhrMwaoSI9XJNsOHjVV_nxtdUerTYk6GuCIMLrebDBY_0gpIBnCGrbvWHHLyQvuYLA/s943/FF2-028%20%20p18%20Sexual%20Politics.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="943" data-original-width="640" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuuBItpk4w3EdnS8SIOqCRUcdZD6MCzoeqMZ3SBw_llnGru-zkVHT8ygGJO8JB-fVNUJrSsVYDy1IKmDSCd0bcNo3GD6GcoCuQwpvtfsR_hPRRLih1oqWtbI70IhrMwaoSI9XJNsOHjVV_nxtdUerTYk6GuCIMLrebDBY_0gpIBnCGrbvWHHLyQvuYLA/w136-h200/FF2-028%20%20p18%20Sexual%20Politics.png" width="136" /></a></div><br /><div>Following in Steinem’s footsteps was Kate Millett (1934-2017), who in the 1960s set out to write the definitive analysis of women’s alleged oppression. What began as her PhD thesis at Columbia University was eventually published in 1970 as Sexual Politics, called the Bible of the women’s movement. It was a treatise filled with factual errors and nonsensical claims about history and biology that nonetheless passed among credulous reviewers as authoritative research, and it formalized many of the terms at the heart of feminism.</div><div><br /></div><div>Though Millett’s area of research specialization was English and Comparative Literature (and the book was largely made up of chapters on novelists D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet), Millett focused extensively in her theory chapter on the alleged scientific consensus regarding “gender identity.” She claimed in a footnote, without attribution, that “The best medical research points to the conclusion that sexual stereotypes have no basis in biology” (n. 7, pp. 26-27), and she explained in her main text, again without evidence, that even the heavier musculature of the human male was not entirely “biological in origin but [was] also culturally encouraged through breeding, diet, and exercise” (p. 27). </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs9Z9DC4ICyejZmWFr44uNz4qNJkYjKPmrrkQvyAqTIGdtIIz_Cwm0ecoqkjgPKZ5I3NbutoDSePynBOEe2hq7V0nBFEBsQWwEOvj4lRyssjMq2xEkTWLC4U7Q_ZCWCwsUWZwLv5i5wUlVMXTM80bQ1I1eQUqeCxIbzNBPa4uRE2gfkSOQS4HEGqDUsA/s700/FF2-028%20%20p21%20Millett.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="420" data-original-width="700" height="120" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhs9Z9DC4ICyejZmWFr44uNz4qNJkYjKPmrrkQvyAqTIGdtIIz_Cwm0ecoqkjgPKZ5I3NbutoDSePynBOEe2hq7V0nBFEBsQWwEOvj4lRyssjMq2xEkTWLC4U7Q_ZCWCwsUWZwLv5i5wUlVMXTM80bQ1I1eQUqeCxIbzNBPa4uRE2gfkSOQS4HEGqDUsA/w200-h120/FF2-028%20%20p21%20Millett.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kate Millett</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>So averse was Millett to accepting any non-conspiratorial explanation for culture that she had to claim it untrue that physical strength had ever mattered in history: she wrote with no attempt at argumentation that “Civilization has always been able to substitute other methods (technic, weaponry, knowledge) for those of physical strength” and she alleged that “Contemporary civilization has no further need of it” (p. 27). She stressed that “Whatever the real differences between the sexes may be, we are not likely to know them until the sexes are treated differently, that is alike” (p. 29)—a conveniently unrealizable proposition that asserted, even while it appeared to draw back from asserting, the socially determined nature of male and female. </div><div><br /></div><div>And finally, she cited the findings of now mainly discredited sexologist John Money and his fellow researchers who had allegedly discovered through research on inter-sex patients “that gender role is determined by postnatal forces, regardless of the anatomy and physiology of the external genitalia” (p. 30). </div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps Millett is not to be blamed for relying so exclusively on what seemed then to be cutting-edge sexology research; we now know that claims about the infinite malleability of gender identity were always controversial and have now been extensively criticized, though they continue to be influential and have resulted in hugely expensive and often personally devastating social engineering programs as well as the trans movement now tearing feminism apart. It would serve feminists well to remember how enthusiastically earlier feminists pushed the social constructionist thesis in the 1960s and after. </div><div><br /></div><div>Millett went so far as to claim that sexual desire itself was learned rather than instinctual: “Even the act of coitus is the product of a long series of learned responses—responses to the patterns and attitudes, even as to the object of sexual choice, which are set up for us by our social environment” (p. 32). Her treatise laid the groundwork for the remaking of human beings as completely blank slates to be refashioned according to a feminist utopian framework.</div><div><br /></div><div>It was a refashioning that had to begin with the destruction of the family, as Kate’s sister Mallory Millett has recently exposed in her memoirs of growing up with Kate and witnessing first-hand Kate’s Maoist-inspired ravings about making “Cultural Revolution” by “destroying the American family […] by destroying the American Patriarch.” The father, husband, provider, and protector, must be destroyed.</div><div>Kate Millett, though was never simply the passionate researcher that she claimed to be in her Introduction to the reissued Sexual Politics; from the time she was a child, she was a victim of bipolar disorder that prevented her from assessing her society reasonably. She spent years in and out of mental institutions, with various suicide attempts.</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj36PFb50V7ZZEP-Y2aBHLr5kEx67myBTsXcTXcprJdWJ3wsrgxndoQaXqUYwPnVSIOPEzL1Vcy6bEQ9F31-R-ngIMTkcWI4Iouin8MlvW3uXV84B3Cpmyh6UUHhgLRv5nXImVI2Yp0yjbjLUvbk1Z6-q0R-3YlvZqWkf9LMCFEKrZ0hRGCT4vasU2FXg/s942/FF2-028%20%20p23%20Smash.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="505" data-original-width="942" height="172" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj36PFb50V7ZZEP-Y2aBHLr5kEx67myBTsXcTXcprJdWJ3wsrgxndoQaXqUYwPnVSIOPEzL1Vcy6bEQ9F31-R-ngIMTkcWI4Iouin8MlvW3uXV84B3Cpmyh6UUHhgLRv5nXImVI2Yp0yjbjLUvbk1Z6-q0R-3YlvZqWkf9LMCFEKrZ0hRGCT4vasU2FXg/s320/FF2-028%20%20p23%20Smash.png" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div>Participating in the founding of the National Organization of Women and many other women’s organizations, she encouraged the feminist takeover of all institutions in order to sow the seeds of America’s dissolution; only then could the oppressive patriarchy at last be undone and a thousand-year feminist Reich begin. She looked forward rapturously to the transformation of human personality in order to “change the quality of life” (p. 363). Unfortunately for her and for us, she was one of the last people in America who should have been tasked with outlining that blueprint. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifwr5vXVGC1XbNP-LLqgIijuXBFKkki1fzigxWQkj0bVZztlaubEMiRmqhUV65ejjOTf2Y7AGkzYpdPXL_yBJt3xmJ-cbPca1hJkekrBYcGiYdC6B2fYF9a0G3XUa2atMJMVIsqFERLMTpCIWozF4xUV3NSaIdKZgyGRvpH7DrYq0oiRZnNVWZEXHxdw/s1616/FF2-028%20-Coal%20miner%20man.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1075" data-original-width="1616" height="133" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifwr5vXVGC1XbNP-LLqgIijuXBFKkki1fzigxWQkj0bVZztlaubEMiRmqhUV65ejjOTf2Y7AGkzYpdPXL_yBJt3xmJ-cbPca1hJkekrBYcGiYdC6B2fYF9a0G3XUa2atMJMVIsqFERLMTpCIWozF4xUV3NSaIdKZgyGRvpH7DrYq0oiRZnNVWZEXHxdw/w200-h133/FF2-028%20-Coal%20miner%20man.png" width="200" /></a></div><br /><div>In 1963, it just so happened that 268 American coal-miners, all men, died on the job, one of many counter-facts that never made its way into any of Freidan’s, Steinem’s, or Millett’s statements about patriarchal privilege. </div><div><br /></div><div>These were highly educated women filled with rage, who spoke in fervent terms about the liberation of women, and the coalition of oppressed groups (Millett, 363) who would allegedly bring it into being. Because men were the alleged architects and beneficiaries of the oppressive order that had to be overthrown, male alienation and suffering were at worst a necessary evil; at best proof to be seized on with satisfaction that the revolution was proceeding. The vengeful feminism of the next 50 years was by 1970 firmly in place. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> Janice Fiamengo</div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-71531859104590422362023-05-07T06:15:00.002-04:002023-05-07T06:16:43.541-04:00The Monstrous Lies of Simone De Beauvoir - Janice Fiamengo<div>Paris intellectual and novelist Simone De Beauvoir wrote a treatise on womanhood entitled The Second Sex that is now considered the twentieth century’s most influential work of feminist philosophy. Despite numerous inaccuracies and logical fallacies, Beauvoir’s assertions about the social construction of sex differences and woman’s Otherness have had a profoundly deforming impact on all subsequent feminist theorizing. </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDDUuPGHUFyuEc4BbwCvsIY_raf_3-DlM4FpM9bQj_Yz0B9HpfCq5VzYQKnEYZqHKrSRnifVrlUX-Y6VvaFk_T3ZKlxb8Y1ZT-MNEsen0tTU8LZMcff_5W-xIvX5AflRYTcDjWizrwhaf9l91CdKAG7XVxy8q6uZUzRUozy4JDK-_N3WpPHRoON77Whg/s1419/Simone-De-Bevoir%2001%20b.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1125" data-original-width="1419" height="159" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDDUuPGHUFyuEc4BbwCvsIY_raf_3-DlM4FpM9bQj_Yz0B9HpfCq5VzYQKnEYZqHKrSRnifVrlUX-Y6VvaFk_T3ZKlxb8Y1ZT-MNEsen0tTU8LZMcff_5W-xIvX5AflRYTcDjWizrwhaf9l91CdKAG7XVxy8q6uZUzRUozy4JDK-_N3WpPHRoON77Whg/w200-h159/Simone-De-Bevoir%2001%20b.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Simone De Beauvoir</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>Simone De Beauvoir’s magnum opus The Second Sex, published in French in 1949 and clocking in at over 750 pages, has been cited as a major influence by key American feminist writers Betty Friedan and Kate Millett. First translated into English in 1953 (with a fuller, more accurate version in 2009), the work is credited with establishing the much-employed distinction—now causing grief to anti-trans feminists—between biological sex and what came to be called gender identity.</div><span><a name='more'></a></span><div><br /></div><div>Beauvoir’s assertion at the beginning of the book’s second volume that “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” is considered the most famous feminist sentence ever written, and has been applauded by queer theorist Judith Butler for establishing femininity as a process of becoming, a performance guided by a cultural script, rather than a biological given. </div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii1RtkfVPCzgDLrKDgYRMKSfVBGviOVuPcGY2zFRe7-jqVq2qGnPtYzTpGOMJC0MFE8NnlHkYyH3ypGDmtntN3H77WXnNFvsmHuykt5stNw5M41UAKWNlpB_4_4T52SxJOLBFfdbWj4YSe954vmVuA5D0_sjkkavtrrHundMVGyCtVVbJOeCtEbzR_Cw/s1914/Jean_Paul_Sartre_1965%20b.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1914" data-original-width="1462" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii1RtkfVPCzgDLrKDgYRMKSfVBGviOVuPcGY2zFRe7-jqVq2qGnPtYzTpGOMJC0MFE8NnlHkYyH3ypGDmtntN3H77WXnNFvsmHuykt5stNw5M41UAKWNlpB_4_4T52SxJOLBFfdbWj4YSe954vmVuA5D0_sjkkavtrrHundMVGyCtVVbJOeCtEbzR_Cw/w153-h200/Jean_Paul_Sartre_1965%20b.png" width="153" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jean-Paul Sartre</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div>Beauvoir was the first major writer to situate feminism within the realm of leftist high theory, placing it amongst the existentialist and Marxist theories she studied and debated with her companion the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and other French intellectuals. Beauvoir’s existentialism is evident in her insistence on the importance of living authentically and freely rather than according to the cultural mores imposed by one’s society; the Marxist influence is evident in her insistence on power struggles between identity groups. </div><div><br /></div><div>The Second Sex is intensely detailed, sophisticated in its terminology, and full of references to literary and psychoanalytic texts, relying heavily, for example, on the work of Karen Horney, a psychoanalyst critical of Freud. Beauvoir contrasted transcendence, by which she meant creative self-fulfillment, with immanence, which referred to the mundane maintenance of physical life in activities such as housekeeping. A massive section on History summarized the entirety of human development as the “triumph of patriarchy” whereby the male’s “biological privilege enabled men to affirm themselves alone as sovereign subjects” (86). The work’s sheer length, its air of caustic certainty, and its universalist sweep all gave its assertions about female psycho-sexual development a gloss of authority and intellectual seriousness. </div><div><br /></div><div>Yet much, even most, of what is presented as evidence, despite the heavy citations, is merely anecdotal, subjective description claiming universal validity but based on little more than selective reading combined with Beauvoir’s personal convictions and jaundiced observations about civilizations’ alleged exaltation of men at women’s expense. The long History section is full of misrepresentations far too numerous to investigate here, including Beauvoir’s quoting of Virginia Woolf’s preposterous lie from A Room of One’s Own that “In England […] women writers always engender hostility” (121). </div><div><br /></div><div>In the rest of this analysis, I will concentrate on the key concepts in Beauvoir’s text that had a major impact on feminism in the English-speaking world: the notion of the Other, the idea of the social construction of femininity, and the bitter claim that male domination is reinforced in sex and the family. </div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps Beauvoir’s most influential formulation—repeated ad nauseum in almost all subsequent feminist tracts—was that woman is the Other of man, the “object” in relation to his “subject,” always defined in relation (and in inferiority) to the male sex. “He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other” (6). By this Beauvoir meant not only that woman was considered different from and less than man, but also that the male sex stood in for the human, while the female never did. </div><div><br /></div><div>As Beauvoir explained in her Introduction, “The categories masculine and feminine appear as symmetrical in a formal way on town hall records or identification papers. The relation of the two sexes is not that of two electrical poles: the man represents both the positive and the neuter” with femaleness always defined by its difference from the male. </div><div><br /></div><div>Self and other are common, even indispensable, categories of meaning, Beauvoir conceded, but the position of women as other was different from that of all other “others”—whether slaves, Jews, blacks, or oppressed workers. Women, unlike these others, had great difficulty establishing themselves as subjects because, as she explained “[Women] have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labor or interests […]. They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to other women” (8), and thus their path to free selfhood was beset with far greater psychological and practical difficulties than that for any other oppressed group. </div><div><br /></div><div>Beauvoir was not content to say that such a state of affairs had developed naturally over time or without ill will on the part of men. Certainly she never admitted that social arrangements could have formed to protect women or ensure human flourishing in perilous times. On the contrary, she emphasized that men had oppressed women because they were stronger, because women were tied to their reproductive function, for which Beauvoir felt particular disgust, as we’ll see, and because men wanted to and needed to dominate: “One of the benefits that oppression secures for the oppressor is that the humblest among them feels superior […] The most mediocre of males believes himself a demigod next to women” (13). </div><div><br /></div><div>And because they were also afraid of women, “legislators organize[d] her oppression” (88) and women were denied even the benevolence allegedly shown to animals. The rest of The Second Sex constituted the oft-angry explanation of how this state of affairs came to be.</div><div><br /></div><div>Beauvoir was nearly forty when she began writing The Second Sex and had lived with deliberate unconventionality to that point, refusing offers of marriage in order to guard her freedom. She maintained various sexual relationships simultaneously, including with many significantly younger female students at the schools where she taught, whom she introduced to one of her primary companions, Sartre. </div><div><br /></div><div>Just a few years before she began work on The Second Sex, in 1943, Beauvoir had been suspended from teaching for a time after the parents of a 17-year-old pupil had charges laid against her for seducing their daughter; and a number of her teenaged student lovers later alleged that the affairs initiated by the older Beauvoir had been sexually and psychologically abusive. </div><div><br /></div><div>Like many intellectuals, Beauvoir and Sartre were impressed by the ideas of Communist revolutionaries about remaking society and human nature, and paid respectful visits to the Soviet Union and Mao’s China in the 1950s. Later in her life, Beauvoir became dependent upon alcohol and drugs, eventually dying of alcohol-related disease at age 78. I finished my reading of The Second Sex grateful that Beauvoir never had children on whom she might have practiced her monstrous ideas. </div><div><br /></div><div>As we have seen, feminists had long posited, without using the exact phrase, the social construction of womanhood, explaining that women might do and be much more than at present once it was fully possible for them to believe that they could do and be. Such an explanation for women’s arrested development, frivolity, and lack of ability was offered as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft in her 1792 treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and was asserted with vigor by John Stuart Mill in his pro-feminist 1869 tract The Subjection of Women. Beauvoir articulated the theory in far more detail, and with more intellectual scaffolding, than had ever been attempted before. She spent hundreds of pages not outright denying the facts of biology but instead—and this was a key rhetorical move much favored by later feminists—alleging that biology had no meaning in itself outside of the human perspective that imposed meaning on it. For example, discussing the facts of women’s weaker musculature, she qualified rather disingenuously that “When the physiological given (muscular inferiority) takes on meaning, this meaning immediately becomes dependent on a whole context; ‘weakness’ is weakness only in light of the aims man sets for himself, the instruments at his disposal, and the laws he imposes” (46). </div><div><br /></div><div>This was a fancy way of saying not much at all—of course weakness had meaning in a context—and meant in practice the radical downplaying of the immense significance of biology. She repeated that, “Biology alone cannot provide an answer to the question that concerns us: why is woman the Other.” </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHxhhkefGkZwKXHArnI-LPNPuEKzBZKGSDzsiGXShJket1RtE9X5zhSAxmdEMN5xbg_-b1BEjiX8WPtygf1OjUXbP6_Y4SHnxAvmvpgTZwiz43ETJJaB2aVadEZ2OC3MbD4APuALKoe7tzLUo7Z0OxPOI7MVc7qllhUShQ0p8OeCWxnrHR9aGQwl4DUA/s1080/FF2-027%20P07%20b%20de%20Beauvoir_.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1029" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHxhhkefGkZwKXHArnI-LPNPuEKzBZKGSDzsiGXShJket1RtE9X5zhSAxmdEMN5xbg_-b1BEjiX8WPtygf1OjUXbP6_Y4SHnxAvmvpgTZwiz43ETJJaB2aVadEZ2OC3MbD4APuALKoe7tzLUo7Z0OxPOI7MVc7qllhUShQ0p8OeCWxnrHR9aGQwl4DUA/w191-h200/FF2-027%20P07%20b%20de%20Beauvoir_.png" width="191" /></a></div><br /><div>Beauvoir didn’t much care how nature had influenced culture: the question for her was what culture had made of nature, and she declared that preeminent (48). This perspective led to her now-famous formulation, “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” </div><div><br /></div><div>Notice the English translation: woman, not a woman. Every female child who grows into an adult becomes a woman by definition; or did before trans ideology. But “woman” as concept is the effect of a cultural process. </div><div><br /></div><div>The long second volume of Beauvoir’s book, called “Lived Experience,” influentially narrated the female child’s Othering. Beauvoir contended that “If well before puberty and sometimes even starting from early childhood she already appears sexually specified, it is not because mysterious instincts immediately destine her to passivity, coquetry, or motherhood but because […] her vocation is imperiously breathed into her from the first years of her life” (283). Through her exaggerated language (“immediately destine”), she essentially denied instinct and the whole biological basis for sexed behavior. (For a complete debunking of De Beauvoir’s thesis, by the way, see Steven Rhoads’ Taking Sex Differences Seriously (2004), which assembles a mountain of scientific evidence proving the biological basis of sex differences from babyhood on.) </div><div><br /></div><div>From this point, Beauvoir indulged in her most sweeping, and often forced, claims. For example, she conceded that young boys are almost always treated more harshly than girls in the family, punished more severely and confined to a far more limited range of acceptable emotions and expression. But for Beauvoir, this was merely a clear sign of the boy’s coming privilege: “If the boy seems less favored than his sisters, it is because there are greater designs for him. The requirements he is subjected to immediately imply a higher estimation” (286).</div><div><br /></div><div>If she had found that girls were more harshly treated, that would have been evidence that girls were valued less highly; but boys’ harsh treatment becomes evidence of their higher valuing. Such is the consistent illogic dictated by Beauvoir’s predetermined conclusion. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFguIiDsmTU3Xr7ejiN3jF4Gmw3IP-ZNEoE8JNG2nqjoTQWVVBLmJNQi64bt4ZFTO_IBE5v8Lj-lyXfKQJb_Jqe3p06OiR34i5HrUmP71HFrGEW6xP8lwOX62fbxGGUdbyct9SPYfIzyGeyHFr0h8hZsRNWDAedR-xb2sRSB7f98AXXTYEjisFLQyVSQ/s1024/FF2-027%20P08.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="727" data-original-width="1024" height="227" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFguIiDsmTU3Xr7ejiN3jF4Gmw3IP-ZNEoE8JNG2nqjoTQWVVBLmJNQi64bt4ZFTO_IBE5v8Lj-lyXfKQJb_Jqe3p06OiR34i5HrUmP71HFrGEW6xP8lwOX62fbxGGUdbyct9SPYfIzyGeyHFr0h8hZsRNWDAedR-xb2sRSB7f98AXXTYEjisFLQyVSQ/s320/FF2-027%20P08.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>Every detail in this section, which draws heavily on post-Freudian theory, is similarly manipulated to confirm her a priori deduction. In compensation for their loss of the mother’s body, boys are allegedly taught to be proud of having a penis, which they can manipulate as an instrument of their will, sending golden arcs through the air. </div><div>The girl, in contrast, is humiliated by having to squat to pee, and comes to be ashamed of her body, anxiously preoccupied by her hidden sex organs, and horrified, allegedly, by the onset of her menstrual periods. </div><div><br /></div><div>Whereas a boy learns the lessons of violence, competition, daring, challenge; the girl, in contrast, is “taught that to please, she must try to please” (295). The meaning of the girl’s selfhood, more and more, is focused on being for others; the boy, in contrast, learns how to be for himself. While the boy looks to a future of alleged self-realization through work, the girl looks forward only to the uncreative drudgery of housework and child-rearing (men’s work is apparently never drudgery). </div><div><br /></div><div>By sixteen, the girl knows that she can never be great or even good because her experiences deform her. “The mere fact of having to hide her sanitary napkins and of concealing her periods inclines her to lies” (369), Beauvoir stated. </div><div><br /></div><div>The problem with this last and many similar representative details is twofold: the detail is presented in a manner that excludes from consideration the proportionate or greater disabilities experienced by boys, such as the knowledge that at time of war, their lives are worth less than female lives. Perhaps even more damningly, the meaning of the detail, presented as conclusive, is not universal. In many cultures ancient and modern, the advent of menstruation is received with celebration or at least satisfaction, not horror. </div><div><br /></div><div>Personally, there is almost nothing in Beauvoir’s description of growing up female that coincides with my own experience. </div><div><br /></div><div>The particular disgust Beauvoir expressed for childbearing and childrearing, which she said “doomed” women to “repetition and routine” (519), and her unqualified affirmation of abortion are perhaps the most glaring examples of Beauvoir’s dishonesty in a treatise that never acknowledged most women’s desire for and joy in motherhood. In her chapter on “The Mother,” she instead focused almost exclusively on motherhood as a burden, even detailing with seeming pleasure the hatred some women felt for their children.</div><div><br /></div><div>About heterosexuality, Beauvoir was equally damning and unfair, arguing that the sexual act embodied male dominance. She noted, for example, that “It is the man […] who chooses the amorous positions, who decides the length and frequency of intercourse. She feels herself to be an instrument: all the freedom is in the other.” Even the language allegedly refused reciprocity: “He takes his pleasure with her; he gives her pleasure” (397. The most telling moment in Beauvoir’s anti-sex screed came when she castigated the man who asked after sex if his partner had experienced orgasm. Here is her analysis of the alleged meaning of the question: </div><div><br /></div><div>“‘Is it enough? Do you want more? Was it good?’ The very fact of asking the question points out the separation and changes the love act into a mechanical operation assumed and controlled by the male. And this is precisely the reason he asks it. Much more than fusion and reciprocity, he seeks domination; when the unity of the couple is undone, he becomes the sole subject [….] he likes the woman to feel humiliated, possessed in spite of herself; he always wants to take her a little more than she gives herself” (411).</div><div><br /></div><div>At this point in the book, one can only conclude that Beauvoir was either being deliberately dishonest or was delusional in assuring readers that the man’s questions were an insidious move to humiliate and disempower the woman whose feelings he only appeared to care about. Nothing could be more grotesquely cynical.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD49NczvUEx65VtmjCEOVgGclHb-ex_Vc2As1QaAsqIgXMnHAqCCvCh2h_xOcsTmoy0FVtIhEN56iM1bA6PSEgwt5lqSjNlLZllzL6cS3nVl9_HuDuyKEWrdR545mK01WUsYb4pZeiuG1686X111hUkQ9x4xIr1JtcLS-eIMxWwXAkHXt8jX1G2v0qXQ/s840/de%20Beauvoir%20drinking%20b.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="840" data-original-width="766" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgD49NczvUEx65VtmjCEOVgGclHb-ex_Vc2As1QaAsqIgXMnHAqCCvCh2h_xOcsTmoy0FVtIhEN56iM1bA6PSEgwt5lqSjNlLZllzL6cS3nVl9_HuDuyKEWrdR545mK01WUsYb4pZeiuG1686X111hUkQ9x4xIr1JtcLS-eIMxWwXAkHXt8jX1G2v0qXQ/w183-h200/de%20Beauvoir%20drinking%20b.png" width="183" /></a></div><br /><div>The fact that Beauvoir’s book has been heralded as definitive, its rancorous assertions celebrated as wise insights testifies to the alarming seductiveness of her bitter worldview. Beauvoir is sometimes considered a master of the aphoristic utterance, but her famous “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” is on reflection quite banal, as there is no necessary contradiction, or even tension, between being born with a certain biological makeup and developing into the mature form of one’s being. Though she did little more than elaborate easily rebutted claims about Otherness, Beauvoir’s conceptions have too often been received as infallible.</div><div><br /></div><div>The most important idea that Beauvoir brought to feminism was the false assertion that women’s exclusion from self-creation was ultimately rooted in misogynistic myths and ideas about womanhood, and that even with full political and legal equality, such ideas would continue to assert their invisible but malignant power. This was a gift to feminist activists that has never ceased giving, guaranteeing that it would always be possible to claim that more needed to be done to aid women in overcoming the unmeasurable hostility of a man-made world. In this sense, almost all feminists are the heirs to the monstrous lies of Simone De Beauvoir. </div><div><br /></div><div> Janice Fiamengo</div><div><br /></div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-32917032934552136692022-09-15T15:43:00.001-04:002022-09-15T15:43:34.654-04:00Feminism at the League of Nations - Janice Fiamengo<div><span style="font-size: medium;">The period between the First and Second World Wars, between the vehement agitation for the vote and the social convulsions of the 60s, is often thought to have been a time of relative quiet for organized feminism.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">But the quiet is an illusion. In fact, the inter-war period was a time of intense activism, as feminist leaders inaugurated the pivotal next phase of the feminist movement, which involved the ideological capture of international and non-governmental organizations—none more so than the League of Nations. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/APUwfZMWepY" width="320" youtube-src-id="APUwfZMWepY"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><span><a name='more'></a></span></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Feminism was always to some extent international. In the nineteenth century, English-speaking feminist activists often crisscrossed the Atlantic to share ideas and strategies; they held conferences and hosted speakers throughout North America, Great Britain, and western Europe. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">But it was in the period after the First World War that feminism became an extensively international phenomenon, one of its primary goals being to create binding international agreements regarding the status of women.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Ultimately, the aim of this international activism was to develop a politics above politics, one that would control decision-making at the national level regardless of which national political party was elected or what the citizens of individual countries actually preferred and voted for.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Using the language of universal rights, feminists such as the American activist Alice Paul, </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Alice Paul, leader of the National Woman’s Party in the United States and British socialist, pacifist, and feminist Vera Brittain set their sights on transforming their societies by changing the very manner in which the world order was envisioned and implemented.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">It is now generally recognized that the United Nations is aggressively feminist, with a huge wing focused on “empowering” women and girls with massively expensive international programs justified by ever more bizarre, unprovable claims about women and girls being the primary victims of climate change, for example, or about how “Achieving full gender equality is still centuries away,” as a recent hysterical press release declared. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">But even before the United Nations existed—it was founded in 1945—feminism was part of the international order through the League of Nations, an organization founded in 1920, with 42 member nations, and predecessor to the UN. A glimpse into the operation of the League provides an excellent example of how feminists laid the groundwork for their global institutional power later in the century.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Though the League of Nations was created specifically to protect member states’ security interests and to prevent another war, it became much more than that, embracing various social reform initiatives. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Ethics and Human Rights Professor Regula Ludi has argued in a recent article for the Journal of Women’s History (2019) that feminist organizations were active in the League of Nations from the time of the its creation, lobbying for the adoption of international legal standards that would increase pressure on reluctant governments and would contribute to what she calls “technocratic internationalism” or global rule by experts (Ludi, p. 14). Feminists early on positioned themselves as experts on all issues related to women, children, peace, and social progress.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Their rationale was from the beginning, building on decades of feminist propaganda in the nineteenth century, that women could offer a unique and alternative model of international relations that would allegedly substitute cooperation for competition because women were more cooperative and less warlike. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">One of the many feminist groups involved with the League was the International Council of Women. This was an influential umbrella organization that had been established back in 1888, with founding members including some we know well here at Studio B, especially suffrage leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton (front row, third from the right) and Susan B. Anthony (front row, second from the left), and the leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Frances Willard (seated between Anthony and Stanton). </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">At best, these activists believed that women were morally superior to men and could if only given the opportunity organize society on a far more just and compassionate basis than men had ever achieved or even cared to try. At worst, they believed that men were barely human, wilful oppressors who should be excluded from most of the world’s decision-making and in need of re-education and social control. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The website of the ICW [International Council of Women] today boldly declares its female supremacism, including its belief in female moral superiority. It states grandly that “ICW work is not limited to reducing political, economic and civil inequities, but encompasses a moralization of the world so that it can be transformed into a good place for all women and children to live. ICW firmly believes that there is an ideal situation of well-being, happiness, and justice that is common to all women, irrespective of social class, ethnicity, or religion.” (see http://www.icw-cif.com/01/03.php) One cannot help but notice how, even while declaring that only women can bring about a “moralization of the world,” these deeply caring women deliberately exclude men from their mention of those who deserve a “good place” to live. This is obviously not an accident. To the feminists of the ICW, men have never had a conception of morality and have never cared to protect or provide for women and children. The ICW’s strange assertion that all women will agree about the “ideal situation of well-being, happiness and justice” is deeply naive at best, more likely dangerously totalitarian. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Organizations like the ICW and many others, including the notable British Six Point Group, which was founded in 1921 to advance women’s political goals, continually lobbied diplomats and representatives at the League of Nations to ensure feminist representation on its various advisory committees. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">These groups were successful in influencing international policy on such matters as child welfare, women workers’ rights, and women’s legal status within marriage; they did so primarily by producing reports for the League and defining issues in feminist terms. In particular, they stressed concepts such as gender hierarchy and sex discrimination, encouraging League members to see women as a victim group distinct from men and globally oppressed. They stressed that gender inequalities in nations were produced by patriarchal social structures and had never come about naturally. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Feminists also fought hard for what they called an Equal Rights Treaty, something that would bind member nations to pursue feminist policies. According to feminist researcher Carol Miller in a detailed article on interwar feminist activism, the idea for an Equal Rights Treaty was first proposed in 1926 by Lady Margaret Rhondda, a Welsh peeress, former suffragette, and chair of the aforementioned British Six Points Group. Lady Rhondda gained the support of American activist Alice Paul, chair of the International Advisory Committee of the American National Woman’s Party. Paul began to mobilize support amongst other activists. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Soon the treaty became a major feminist initiative. One League member remarked that “Every time one meets members of women’s organizations, this question [of an equal rights treaty] is brought up” (qtd in Ludi, p. 18). Although some member nations resisted the idea, objecting that customary relations between men and women were inextricable from each nation’s unique culture and should not be subject to a sweeping universal rule, that perspective quickly came to seem embarrassingly retrograde. One member of a feminist organization called Equal Rights International was happy to report that “One felt very strongly at Geneva that few nations were prepared to oppose ‘equality’” (qtd in Ludi, p. 23).</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Under pressure from feminists over years, the League finally agreed in 1937 to conduct an international survey, which would collect data on the legal, political, and economic status of women in preparation for a report on the status of women and recommendations for its improvement. The committee in charge of the survey and report was staffed with a majority of feminist women: French professor of law Suzanne Bastid, New York judge Dorothy Kenyon, Anka Godjevac, a Yugoslavian lawyer, and Kirsten Hesselgren, a Swedish MP.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In retrospect, it seems remarkable that in the later 1930s, a time when diplomatic crises and deepening hostilities between nations were bringing world conflagration ever closer, the League should have agreed to divert resources and intellectual energy to a study of the status of women. Feminists had been successful in convincing the League that women’s issues were inextricable from the League’s main business of international security. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The feminist methodology at the League seemed to operate on the following quite brilliant question: why work to convince a nation to carry out your ideological demands through the give-and-take contest of the democratic process, when you could simply persuade some unelected technocrats to impose your worldview by fiat? </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Carol Miller quotes Vera Brittain arguing that “The time has now come to move from the national to the international sphere, and to endeavour to obtain by international agreement what national legislation has failed to accomplish” (qtd in Miller, p. 221). </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">As Professor Ludi notes in her research, feminist activism at the international level was an important part of “the process by which certain political issues [were] displaced from the national […] and into the international realm” (qtd in Ludi, p. 21). Feminists astutely recognized that pushing for international standards determined by feminist experts would concentrate power in the hands of a decision-making elite. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In the end, the international survey on the status of women was never completed, as League members eventually had to confront the cataclysm of the Second World War and, in effect, the failure of the organization whose main purpose had been to prevent another war. But although no binding Equal Rights Treaty resulted from the investigations, the push for a global solution to feminist issues had born fruit.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">By this point, it was clear that a majority at the League of Nations had been convinced, or at least had decided to officially accept, that feminist ideas about women’s oppression were not only legitimate but were also intimately related to global security and development.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">And the effect was long-lasting. The feminist doctrine that oppression of women was universal and was caused by systemic inequities framed international discussions for the next century. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Moreover, activism towards an Equal Rights Treaty did not end with the League. When the United Nations was formed in 1945, a Commission on the Status of Women was immediately created; and as Carol Miller explains, “The scheme outlined by the League committee of experts, and the material collected in the course of its inquiry, provided the basis for the early activities of the UN Status of Women Commission.” </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Later in the century, a comprehensive Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against women was ratified in 1981. It contains thirty distinct provisions for advancing women’s “equality” while also recognizing women’s special needs and disabilities as women, needs which require special treatment to redress imbalances or eliminate wrongs. It thus commits ratifying states to a sweeping range of impossible-to-satisfy initiatives and promises, such as making sure women have access to abortion and “maternity leave with pay,” have the “right to bank loans,” and the “right to participate in recreational activities and sports,” to name only a very few of the intrusive and endlessly expensive standards that must be complied with. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The idea that men and women’s needs are best served through a holistic approach that values men and women equally, is appropriate to each country’s unique culture, and recognizes that men also have distinct needs and disabilities was decisively quashed by the acceptance of feminist dogma and has never been successfully rehabilitated.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In short, feminist demands advanced at the League of Nations, cloaked in authoritative-seeming language and with a veneer of expert legitimacy, quickly became an integral part of decision-making at the highest international levels, thus assuring the emergence of global feminist power in the second half of the twentieth century. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> Janice Fiamengo</span></span><br /></div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-45203203535317625122022-09-15T15:36:00.000-04:002022-09-15T15:36:09.220-04:00Feminism Between the Wars, The 1920s Lesbian Scene in Paris - Janice Fiamengo<div><span style="font-size: medium;">The Roaring 20s was in many ways a dress rehearsal for the 1960s, inspired by economic prosperity and an intoxicating sense that traditional mores no longer applied, especially to women. Having achieved the more sober of the stated goals of the feminist movement—voting rights, professional opportunities—an unprecedented number of women decided to live openly as lesbians apart from men (though often supported by men’s money). Some of their statements prefigure the hateful lesbian separatist rhetoric that became popular a half century later.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/s-Rds_LhpQ8" width="320" youtube-src-id="s-Rds_LhpQ8"></iframe></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><span><span style="font-size: medium;"><a name='more'></a></span></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">The main story told about feminism today is that it was the 1960s and 70s that brought major social changes: the so-called sexual liberation of women, often including the embrace of casual, non-procreative sex, the renunciation of marriage as oppressive, lesbianism and gender nonconformity, and the widespread denigration of male authority and male sexuality. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” the American lesbian poet and intellectual Adrienne Rich summed up such developments, condemning heterosexuality and encouraging women to withdraw their attention, energy, and caring from men. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Rich advocated what she called “the lesbian continuum” in which women, if they did not become actual lesbians, as Rich herself did, focused their love and energy mainly on other women. For Rich, lesbianism was a natural extension of feminism.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">But lesbianism as a social movement was not new. It had begun in the early 20th century when, fired by 50 years of feminist grievance-mongering, a significant number of women pre-empted Rich. Some rejected the markers of femininity, expressed scorn for marriage and child-rearing, and sought to build exclusive communities of women. In the words of British novelist Virginia Woolf, written teasingly in a letter to her lesbian lover, Vita Sackville-West, it was time to ”throw over your man” and try out new identities (qtd. in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 508). </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">My point here is not to castigate lesbianism, but rather to highlight instances of political lesbianism, in which the choice to love women was inseparable from the choice to reject men as unworthy of love. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Of course not all the lesbians of the 20s fell into that category; many simply preferred women and found ways to live in communities where lesbian partnerships were acceptable. But a significant number saw lesbian love as superior, in feminist terms, to heterosexuality.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Many of these women gravitated to Paris, known as a city where both men and women could live their homosexuality openly. Paris was also a place where sexual experimentation was closely related to literary and artistic experimentation. “Make it new” was the credo of the modernist movement of the early twentieth century. Under Modernism, writers and other artists rejected the accepted rules of artistic representation, seeking to shock audiences into new ways of perceiving. New forms of sexual identity became part of the modernist revolution. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">And who could be surprised? Rejection of men by women was surely a logical response by anyone who took seriously what feminists such as Josephine Butler, Mona Caird, and Christabel Pankhurst, to name only a few, had been saying for the previous 50 + years about women’s exploitation by men and the predatory and diseased nature of men. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">For many of the women escaping their conventional lives, there was a general sense that all of society could be revolutionized, the slate wiped clean, and a new era begun characterized by free love and sexual adventure. Men could be women and women could be men, and the world would be a better place when both sexes were less sexually repressed. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">New Yorker journalist and novelist Janet Flanner, who wrote under the pseudonym Genet, spoke for many in her tongue-in-cheek utopian observation that “For thousands of years the concentrated aim of society has been to cut down on kissing. With that same amount of energy […], society could have stopped war, established liberty, given everybody a free education, free bathtubs, free music, free pianos and changed the human mind to boot” (Janet Flanner, The Cubicle City, 1926). </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The revolutionaries of the 1920s, not unlike those of the French Revolution, were confident that the human mind could be changed by remaking society. For more information about the personalities discussed in this essay, see Diana Souhami’s book No Modernism without Lesbians (2020).</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Janet Flanner, a succesful American journalist, had moved to Paris partly to escape a dull marriage. In 1922, she and fellow American poet and journalist Solita Solano, birth name Sarah Wilkinson, began a new life there in an openly lesbian and open relationship in which each could take the lovers they chose. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Flanner’s many erotic liaisons included Dorothy Wilde, nicknamed Dolly, the niece of playwright Oscar Wilde. Dolly sought to carry on her famous uncle’s legacy with her gender-flouting and drug-taking pose of witty decadence. Dolly Wilde indulged heavily in alcohol, cocaine, and heroine, as well as in what she called “emergency seductions,” the sexual adventures she used as an antidote to the boredom and unhappiness of everyday life. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Flanner, Solano, Wilde and others gathered around institutions like American expatriate Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookstore, called Shakespeare and Company, which sold avant-garde literature, some of it, including James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, banned for obscenity in much of the English-speaking world. In 1928, Beach famously stocked Radclyffe Hall’s outlawed lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Many of the lesbians in Paris were writers or patrons of the arts. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Many chose new names for themselves and dressed in distinctive ways, sometimes with brilliantined short hair, high collars, and monocles, to signal their self-creation apart from the gender conventions of their society. Sometimes they took their inspiration from the ancient Greek poet Sappho and her lesbian community. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The wealthy American heiress Natalie Barney bought a house just west of Paris where women who had relinquished ties to their country of origin as well as to husbands and children could join an artistic and erotic community that performed lesbian rituals, including dances in gauze togas around an incense-burning altar. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Annie Winifred Glover changed her name to Bryher (after an island off the Cornish coast of England) and came to Paris to devote herself to the American poet Hilda Doolittle, known as H.D., and her various lovers. Bryher, who had inherited her father’s enormous wealth, financially supported many avant-garde writers and their works. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">One of the publications Bryher financed was Djuna Barnes’s rambunctious novel Ladies Almanack (1928), an irreverent manual for lesbians full of hidden references to real Paris lesbians who had banished “offspring and spouse.” The main character in the book, Dame Evangeline Musset, a lesbian pope, was based on the afore-mentioned Natalie Barney. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Barney was a cause célèbre in and around Paris. She was a woman who spoke openly of her lesbian affairs, of which she had dozens if not hundreds, and was obsessed with seducing women. Barney hosted a regular Friday Salon where her lovers past, present, and future met and partied. In Djuna Barnes’s novel, Barney’s character, Dame Musset, lived until she was 99 years old. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">At her death, forty women with shaved heads carried her corpse through the streets of Paris to her funeral pyre, where her famous tongue “flamed and would not suffer Ash” until the 40 acolytes sat on the tongue where “from under their Skirts a slow Smoke issued.” Many other lesbian works featured this doyenne of lesbian love, including Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) Liane de Pougy’s Idylle Saphique (1901), and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus’ The Angel and the Perverts (1930).</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The opposite of Barney’s cornucopia of lesbian loves was embodied in Gertrude Stein’s domestic arrangement with Alice B. Toklas. Stein was possibly the most famous mainly unread modernist author in Paris. Her partnership with Toklas, who subsumed her own personality entirely in Stein’s, was the bedrock of her writing life, and the two were seen everywhere together. Toklas typed all Stein’s manuscripts, looked after her house, answered correspondence, answered the door, and made it possible for Stein to be Gertrude Stein; Stein in turn wrote love poems about Toklas’s “cows” (a code word for orgasm).</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Virginia Woolf, who did not move to Paris, also wrote a novel, Orlando (1828) about her woman lover, the aristocratic lesbian Vita Sackville-West, who had scandalized upper-class British society when she and another woman, Violet Trefusis, had to be pursued and brought back home by the husbands they had abandoned when they eloped together to France. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Woolf’s novel idealized and fictionalized a Vita-like hero who changed sexes in the course of the book and lived through many centuries. Woolf, though married, carried on an erotic friendship for years with the sexually voracious Vita. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Though most of these women were simply interested in being free, the explicit rejection of men not infrequently figured in their statements about who they were. Bryher identified herself as a feminist who fought for women’s rights. Gertrude Stein dismissed the carnage of the first half of the twentieth century as a problem of too many fathers: “Father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and father Lewis and father Blum and father France […] There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it, fathers are depressing” (Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography). </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Natalie Barney wrote that “I neither like nor dislike men. I resent them for having done so much evil to women. They are our political adversaries” (Pensees d’une amazon) and she was explicit in rejecting everything have to do with conventional domestic life, marriage, and especially children, claiming defiantly that “The finest life is spent creating oneself, not procreating” (Pensees d’une Amazon). </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Though the aim was to create a productive and supportive community of women, real life was always more complicated than lesbian idealism. Love triangles, marriages of convenience (mostly with gay men), complicated allegiances and overlapping liaisons led inevitably to jealousy, bitterness, and sometimes mental breakdowns and suicide attempts, such as of the afore-mentioned Dolly Wilde. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The poet H.D. was often in crisis, her mental and emotional instability exacerbated by ever-shifting, often unwise entanglements. When her long-term supporter Bryher first met her, she was married to one man and pregnant by another; neither of whom wanted to take responsibility for her child. Her daughter Perdita was for years shunted between the fragile mother incapable of focusing on her child’s needs and various others who could not provide the stable home the child craved. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Many of Natalie Barney’s lovers were pushed to the edge by Barney’s refusal to be sexually faithful or consistent. Vita Sackville-West’s mother famously pasted a photograph of Virginia Woolf in her copy of Woolf’s novel Orlando and described the picture as “The awful face of a mad woman whose successful mad desire is to separate people who care for each other. I loathe this woman for having changed my Vita and taken her away from me” (Vita Sackville-West’s mother, qtd in No Modernism Without Lesbians, p. 37).</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The 1920s was a dress rehearsal in small for the far more widespread revolution in sexual mores of the later 1960s and 70s, when many more women joined women’s groups to raise their consciousness, emphasized the importance of orgasm, took women lovers as an act of radical emancipation, and left their husbands and children in rejection of patriarchy. The 1920s Paris experiment in lesbian living was in many ways predictive of the later era. In particular, the idea that women should pursue sexual pleasure as a primary or even the primary goal of their lives, and that it was particularly admirable to do so without men (or children) even when one’s behaviors mimicked what was so often criticized in male behavior, would have been impossible without decades of feminist proselytizing about female moral superiority and male perfidy. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Feminist insistence on women’s equality rights often led, and in the end took a back seat, to the insistence that whatever women wanted in the moment was their right, no matter how irresponsible, careless, or destructive. The many broken hearts and smashed lives that followed, then and now, were never acknowledged by the propagandists of feminism. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> Janice Fiamengo</span></span><br /></div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-20682844760424319052022-09-15T15:26:00.001-04:002022-09-15T15:26:32.124-04:00Feminism Between the Wars: The Self Pity of Virginia Woolf - Janice Fiamengo<div><span style="font-size: medium;">Feminist icon Virginia Woolf exemplified the direction that feminism would take in the decades after the First World War. No matter how many legal rights and professional opportunities women gained, feminists like Woolf continued to express condemnation of all men and conviction of oppression. In her landmark 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, Woolf turned to alleged psychological oppression to justify her deep sense of grievance. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9-IfyP2xtI4" width="320" youtube-src-id="9-IfyP2xtI4"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><a name='more'></a></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">By the end of the First World War, feminism had achieved its expressed aims. The barriers to women’s full participation in politics, higher education, and the professions had either fallen or were in the process of falling. Determined and talented women could, with greater freedom and public support than ever before, shape their lives as they wished. In North America and Great Britain, the end of World War I brought the right to vote, the right to occupy public office, and the complete opening of professions such as law, medicine, and academia. Higher education had long been available to women, but after the First World War, the last bastions of elite institutions such as Cambridge and Oxford also fully opened their doors to female students. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The reaction of feminists to their expanded opportunities and freedoms was not to rethink their castigation of male tyranny, however. It was certainly not to express any awareness of male sacrifice in war (though the slaughter of the First World War was a vivid memory) or gratitude for women’s status as the protected sex. It was certainly not to acknowledge that at least some significant number of men had supported women’s advancement. On the contrary, feminist response was to continue expressing outrage at women’s victimhood. Even (or especially) women with the greatest advantages and success wrote treatises on sexism.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">One of the angriest feminist voices of the period between the First and Second World Wars was a famous and admired woman, the avant-garde British writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), whose husband made it possible for her over decades to write and to cast her aspersions upon patriarchal authority. Like many feminists, Woolf, daughter of the literary critic Leslie Stephen, had a privileged upbringing far better than most men, and a rigorous education. From the age of fifteen, she had private lessons in ancient Greek and Latin literature by various classicists, two of them highly educated women who provided role models of female intellectual independence. Her father encouraged her to read whatever books interested her in his extensive personal library. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">What she remembered about her father, however—and translated into her resentment of alleged patriarchal cruelty—was her father’s emotional neediness after her mother’s and older sister’s deaths. Her father, in lonely mourning and becoming deaf, relied on her and her siblings excessively, a dependency she unfairly called “brutality.” She also remembered with deep bitterness her father’s unwillingness to pay for her education at Cambridge, though it was far from clear that she was physically and emotionally strong enough to attend, being subject to nervous breakdowns and periods of suicidality throughout her life. She did eventually commit suicide at the age of 59. After her father’s death, Virginia reflected unsympathetically that if he had lived into his 90s, “His life would have entirely ended mine.”</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Woolf’s life not only did not end, but became one of the most celebrated of her time. She married Leonard Woolf, an intellectual companion who supported her, protected her, and allowed her a wide degree of freedom, including having a lesbian lover for some years. She and her husband ran Hogarth Press, which published many modernist works of literature. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In 1928, in the midst of her success, she wrote her furious feminist classic A Room of One’s Own (published the following year) in which she resentfully compared “the safety and prosperity of the one sex” (all those young men killed or maimed in the trenches of World War One) to the ”poverty and insecurity of the other” (31), launching herself securely on a sea of feminist myths about male privilege, myths fashioned in the envious imagination of a woman who had had little in her life, comparatively speaking, but safety and prosperity, and who had been enabled and encouraged by men. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Woolf had been asked to speak on the subject of Women and Fiction to female students at Newnham and Girton Colleges at Cambridge University, and she used the occasion, in a disquisition full of half-truths, untruths, and unquenchable self-pity, to assert that women were not yet able to create on an even footing with men because they had been continually “snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted” (71)—in other words, subject to psychological oppression by men. She used various literary devices to illustrate her thesis, describing at the beginning how while thinking about what to say in her lecture, she lost her train of thought because a man forced her off the grass plot at Cambridge University, telling her that women must not walk there. The story was not literally true, but was meant to epitomize what men had always done and continued to do to women: prevent them from going—with their thoughts, their unique feminine creativity—in the manner they wished to go. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Woolf’s essay poured out scorn on men throughout history. She asserted that the vast majority of these men were possessed by a strong urge to assert their superiority over women by writing treatises and making proclamations about female inadequacy and incompetence. She crafted a picture of herself in the library looking through an allegedly interminable collection of such treatises, referring to one Professor von X, who was “engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex” (39).</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">There was no actual book with that title; in fact, there were titles by such luminaries as John Stuart Mill on The Subjection of Women (1869) about men’s injustice to women, and by Frances Swiney, on The Awakening of Women (1899) about the physiological, spiritual, and moral superiority of women, and many feminist works by the likes of Josephine Butler, Mona Caird, and Christabel Pankhurst attacking men as immoral, diseased, and predatory; but Woolf made no mention of them. She was concerned only with those men for whom “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (45). </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">That was, in her opinion, primarily what men required of women—to reflect men at twice their size—and it was all they had been willing to allow women to do; men were always telling women, “You can’t do this and you shan’t do that!” (122). </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Woolf’s sweeping condemnation of male bigotry leads to a question she never does address, which is how she came to be speaking at two Cambridge University colleges that had opened their doors to women almost 60 years previously: Girton College in 1869 and Newnham in 1871. A large number of men must have been asleep at the wheel when the extensive preparation for these colleges was being undertaken. How had it happened? For Woolf, “The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself” (72). She never did pause to explain how, if the opposition had been so heated and unvarying as she claimed, the emancipation had taken place at all.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">But Woolf’s point was, really, that emancipation had NOT taken place. Some minor external circumstances had changed, but women were still everywhere in chains. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">To illustrate the allegedly impossible situation of the woman writer, Woolf created a personage called Judith Shakespeare, sister to William, a young woman possessing equal talent and energy as her brother but cruelly prevented from pursuing her ambition and genius. (She had forgotten, perhaps that Shakespeare had a daughter named Judith). Having run away from home to London at age 17 in order to escape the marriage her father had arranged for her without her consent, Judith was barred from the theatres, could get no training, had no opportunity for an independent life, and eventually, having been seduced and abandoned, “killed herself one winter’s night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omni-buses now stop outside the Elephant and Castle” (62). In consequence, Woolf implied, there was no tradition of women writers, no distinctive female style, and no honest writing about the lives of women.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Here was a melodramatic tale that has been widely cited in the many decades since its publication, despite the fact that almost everything it asserts is an exaggeration, a misrepresentation, an unprovable fantasy, or an outright fabrication. Woolf immediately undermined her own story about the lack of a female tradition by discussing acclaimed female writers in history. One of the most notable of these was </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Aphra Behn (a pseudonym) [1640-1689]; Behn was born within a few decades of Shakespeare’s death, and might almost have been Shakespeare’s sister (or at least a niece) both in her influence and in the enormous scope of her writing, which included sexually daring subject matter. Behn earned an independent living as a playwright and poet in the half-century after Shakespeare. Woolf’s allegation that a female Shakespeare would have had her ambitions and talents thwarted is disproven by her very first significant example. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Woolf then goes on to discuss other widely admired female writers, in particular Jane Austen [1775-1817], the Bronte sisters, Charlotte [1816-1855] and Emily Bronte [1818-1848], and George Eliot [1819-1880], in order to emphasize the enormous difficulties they faced. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Here her ignorance or feminist intransigence are vividly evident. Woolf’s repeated insistence over many pages that these are the only four female writers worth discussing is misleading from the start. What about Maria Edgeworth [1768-1849], 18th century essayist and moralist, Mary Shelley [1797-1851], author of Frankenstein, novelist Elizabeth Gaskell [1810-1865], journalist Harriet Martineau [1802-1876], or poet Christina Rossetti [1830-1894]? </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">And why ignore American women writers like poet Emily Dickinson [1830-1886] and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe [1811-1896], as well as all the lesser writers, the Frances Brookes and the Fanny Burneys and Elizabeth Inchbalds, who made a name for themselves in their time and often good money from their writings. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">There was a well-developed tradition of women’s literature spanning at least 150 years, yet Woolf narrows it to four names in order to emphasize scarcity and exclusion (99).</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Even with the acknowledged greats, Woolf’s emphasis is on the negative. She cannot accept that a single woman writer in history was ever encouraged by her family, ever “free” to create as men allegedly were; and this conviction leads her into melodramatic theorizing and fact-free assertions too numerous to catalogue, including the balderdash that</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> “To Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice”—rank nonsense – and the howler that all four of her significant female writers were “compelled […] to write novels”(86) because that was the only literary form possible or available to them though at least two of the four, according to Woolf, “were not by nature novelists.” She believed that Emily Bronte “should have written poetic plays” and that George Eliot’s “capacious mind” would have been better occupied with “history or biography” (87).</span></div></blockquote><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">But but but … Bronte DID write poetry, some of it quite good; and George Eliot wrote much more than novels, including highly significant non-fiction essays and translations from the German of works of biblical criticism and philosophy. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In Woolf’s mind, these women had to have been held back in some manner, lacking the freedom, the leisure, the “room of one’s own” and all the mental equipment and cultural authority necessary to write as men were always able to write. Whether the men ever had difficulties she does, barely, acknowledge, but always with the proviso that the women had these difficulties too and worse. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The fact that the prodigiously intellectual and acclaimed woman writer George Eliot (real name Marian Evans), writing half a century before Woolf, DID have a room of her own, lived with a man who made it possible for her to spend her days writing largely uninterrupted, and made a great deal of money from her writing is never touched by Woolf, who is too busy spinning tales about women’s artificially imposed disabilities. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Woolf’s prejudices overpowered her mind. Ten years later, her 1938 essay Three Guineas blamed all men, and only men, for war and could find no significant distinction between the Church of England and the Nazi Party. In a typically Woolfian expression of disdain, she wrote that if war came to England, as there was no real difference between Hitler’s Germany and patriarchal Britain, women should not only refuse to fight but should refuse to make munitions or nurse the wounded. The conservative commentator Theodore Dalrymple described the essay as a classic example of Woolf’s “narcissistic rage.”</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf ended by encouraging young educated women to write “all kinds of books” (142), partly to relieve her own tedium in reading male-authored “history [that was] too much about wars; biography too much about great men” (142). She could not resist, at her essay’s end, the sneer of contempt—men were SO very boring. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Ironically, her hope for women writers was that eventually they would write with what she saw as the extraordinary impersonality of Shakespeare, in whose plays nothing merely personal, no anger or prejudice or ideology, ever betrayed the playwright. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">But Woolf herself, as nearly every line in the essay shows, was not ready to give up her feminist anger. In A Room of One’s Own, she set the pattern for dozens and dozens of feminist writers to come, for whom no opportunities would ever be enough, and no feminist grievance too inconsequential or farcical.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>Janice Fiamengo</span></div>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-10907823773236966372022-09-15T15:16:00.001-04:002022-09-15T15:16:34.554-04:00Sex Insanity Amongst Early Feminists - Janice Fiamengo<div><span style="font-size: medium;">Dissident British feminist Wilma Meikle published a book in 1917 to warn against aspects of the contemporary feminist movement that she hoped would not become dominant in the years after the First World War. Although she was proved wrong in her hopes, her book provides a fascinating window onto the roots of feminist sex delirium.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Cu536CwEkm0" width="320" youtube-src-id="Cu536CwEkm0"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><span><a name='more'></a></span></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Wilma Meikle is today an extremely obscure writer about whom almost nothing is known. If you search for her name in Google, nearly the only information to be found is a book with the intriguing title Towards a Sane Feminism, published by the Robert M. McBride publisher in 1917, and now reprinted by the Leopold Classic Library, which is dedicated to getting out-of-print books back into circulation. The book is a treasure-trove of historical insights. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Published during the First World War at a time when most feminists had suspended their agitation for the vote, the book clearly suggested in its title that at least some elements of pre-war feminism were not sane, with the author offering her prescription for the movement’s improved health. Alas, the irrational aspects of the movement that Meikle hoped would wither away once women became more integrated into public life eventually came to control and direct it almost entirely. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Meikle wrote as a committed feminist, and her assumptions, like those of nearly all feminists, included the axiom that women were oppressed in a system that favored men. For example, she stated, without evidence, that under capitalism, women were “oppressed […] far more severely than [male] workers were oppressed” (p. 27). She didn’t try to defend this claim, and even cursory research shows that despite workers’ unions being majority male, the working hours and conditions of women were regulated for women’s protection far sooner than were those of men. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Still, as we’ll see, Meikle didn’t particularly blame individual men for present conditions, and she definitely didn’t believe that feminism should devote itself to ever-angrier denunciations of male privilege; in fact, she explicitly criticized the leaders of the militant suffragettes, Christabel Pankhurst and her mother Emmeline, for their “bitter injustice to men” and their “uncontrolled emotionalism” (p. 18).</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">As Meikle stated in the conclusion to her book, the objective of a sane feminism was to disappear as a movement over time, absorbed into what she called the “common cause of humanity” (168). Militancy, she said outright, had been “ridiculous and useless” (p. 19), a “prodigious crop of feminine wild oats” (p. 14) that she hoped would not be revived at the war’s end. Her descriptions of feminist sex hysteria and anti-male revulsion are well worth reading as a window onto the early 20th century women’s movement, compelling evidence that hatred of men and obsession with sex as a form of oppression did not originate in a later, radical form of feminism—the 1980s era of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, for example—but were present amongst its earliest adherents. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In general, Meikle believed that the agitation for the vote and for access to higher education had been misguided, rooted in the fact that the leaders of nineteenth-century feminism had been mostly elite, wealthy women, often financially independent, who wanted to compete with men intellectually. “Feminism in its beginnings was the desire of a handful of ambitious, intellectual women for a status equal to that of the men of their own class” (p. 71). </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">But political and intellectual equality with upper-class men, Meikle argued, were not nearly so important as economic power and self-sufficiency, which was what the vast bulk of women needed. Meikle wanted to see women as “skilled mechanics or prosperous shopkeepers or highly salaried engineers and factory managers,” workers and owners whose “commercial importance” would compel respect (p. 29); and she hoped that women’s war work would be “an invaluable preparation” for their future participation in the workforce. When women had genuine earning power and industrial skills to contribute to the economic base of their societies, marriage would be placed on a better footing, because women would no longer be dependent on their husbands, and political equality would follow as a matter of course. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Meikle’s strongest hopes for the feminism of the future were that it would encourage women to become skilled workers who would join together in trade unions to uphold their interests and that entrepreneurial women would start their own businesses. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Here, like many feminists, Meikle had more faith in women’s self-reliant nature than the future justified, believing as she did that few women would choose economic dependency and that women would set about developing a wide variety of skills as soon as they were able. Capable and ambitious herself, she imagined that most women were. Unfortunately, as 1960s feminists like Betty Friedan admitted, later generations of women, though perfectly free to develop skilled trades or to open their own businesses, in the main chose not to do so, by far preferring part-time, state-funded, and helping professions, or continuing access to their husbands’ salaries. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">What is most relevant for our purposes is Meikle’s unsparing analysis of two sides of the contemporary feminist movement as it pertained to the question of sex. Long repressed and spoken of only in whispers, the feminist sensibility had what Meikle considered a right-wing and a left-wing, both of them unbalanced and unhealthy. On the right wing were those feminists who rejected sex as a form of “degradation” (p. 88); on the left wing were those who saw promiscuity as an act of liberation to be promoted and celebrated. In our day, both wings persist, often within the same feminist argument. As Meikle saw it, neither side offered a productive way forward. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Meikle described feminists who spoke with horror of the shameful thing men forced on women in marriage, insisting on life-long celibacy or the right of married women to drastically reduce the frequency of sexual relations with their husbands. “These were women who pierced their veil of gentility with a disquieting hint, women who flung it aside to display a lamentable and astounding picture of their married life” (p. 84). Describing the tales of suffering and indignity such women told, as well as the defiant refusal of some portion of women to marry, she summed up that “All of them—both the wives with a grievance and the complaisant spinsters—believed very sincerely that marriage must always be a sexual sacrifice for women” (p. 86). And she went on to say that “These were the women who regarded the majority of men as conscious and wilful oppressors” (p. 84).</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Opposed to these “extremists of the right wing,” as Meikle called them, were the “wild spirits of the extreme left” (p. 89), feminists who embraced free love and made that the central fact of their politics, feverishly pursuing an elusive ideal of sexual emancipation. Such women scorned marriage and seemed to hold “that only temporary and unlegalized unions” were morally justifiable (p. 89). Such women met together, testifying about their sexual “insurgency” with the born-again fervor more often found at a “Salvation Army Meeting” (p. 90), seeking converts to their cause. Meikle found them to be desperate, rudderless, “obsessed by passion”; and off-putting in the “moral collapse, the promiscuous, loveless passions, [and] the general messiness of [their] lives” (p. 95). </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">It is a fascinating diagnosis of the two sides of feminist sex radicalism. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">More than one hundred years after Meikle wrote, we are all still all-too familiar with both of these strands of feminism, now often united in the same woman and the same advocacy. To choose one example out of the many we see all around us, we might read the gender editor at the once august New York Times, Jessica Bennett, who wrote a classic op/ed in 2017 called “When Saying Yes is Easier Than Saying No.” The article is about what Bennett called the many “grey zones” of sex, where consent shades into coercion. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Bennett gave a deliberately unromantic itemization of the many different types of sex experienced by most modern women—apparently she and her friends know them well: there is the sex that is begrudgingly consensual, because the woman can’t be bothered to say no, there is lukewarm sex, because it just was, there is outright bad sex, which one regrets later but thought would be good, and so on. It seems that there are a lot of women having sex they’re not really into because they didn’t figure out early enough that it wasn’t what they wanted and because the trouble of saying No was more effort than these women wanted to put in. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">But this is the same woman who agonizes, in the very same article, about the difficulty of defining consent, that sacred concept for the wilting flowers of victimhood feminist ideology. After detailing the manner in which modern women tumble somewhat unhappily but consensually into beds with a seemingly endless series of men they don’t know very well and weren’t that into, Bennett goes on to worry in typical feminist fashion about the difficulty for women of giving a 100% yes, allegedly because so many women and girls are taught that their bodies are not really their own, that they “exist for male sexual pleasure.” </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">This claim, offered in defiance of hundreds of everyday slogans and popular culture scenarios, leads Bennett to wonder, “What about the woman who doesn’t feel that she can speak up because of cultural expectations? Should that woman be considered unable to consent?” It’s not at all clear what Bennett is saying here: is she advocating that such women, who can’t really consent, should be forced into chastity belts for their own protection? Anyone suggesting that such women might be better off getting to know the men they have sex with will of course be shouted down for slut-shaming. In a dazzling act of having it both ways, Bennett presents us with woman as insouciant slut, assessing her 50 shades of sexual pleasure or lack thereof, and at the same time woman as passive victim of a male-dominated sexual culture, unable to let her yes be yes. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Wilma Meikle would have found it a dizzyingly confused argument. But she would have recognized in her own comrades the elements that produced it—the disgust with male sexuality on the one hand, the insistence on female sexual rebellion on the other.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In 1917, Meikle was confident that a new generation of feminist women was coming into existence, those who held no hostility towards men and sought reasonable solutions to the old sex problems. “They regarded men as fellow-discoverers, equally blundering, equally uninstructed, equally suffering […] The old theory of an Eve punished by God and an Adam abetted by the law found them incredulous. Their observations convinced them that Nature had established an exquisite balance between the joys and sorrows and consolations of male and female” (p. 91-92). In the final sentences of her book, Meikle expressed her confidence that feminism as a movement would eventually die out when it had achieved its aims, when women had full rights and freedoms, at which point women and men would join together to work for the best society possible. “When a further stage of civilization gives women the same liberties as men,” she predicted, “the sexes may reasonably be expected to work together in civic and industrial life without the interruption of sex bickerings” (p. 168).</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Little did Meikle know that feminists would not stop with gaining the same liberties as men, or perhaps that they never would admit that such liberties had been gained. There would always be some perceived inequality, some claimed male privilege or entitlement, some demand that more must be done for women, to justify plenty more bickering, often involving the very sex problems that Meikle had thought close to resolution. Far from being resolved in the freedom and frankness of a new sexual era, anti-male hysteria and complaint has increased ten-thousandfold. It is useful to realize that these are not a new creation, an offshoot of the Second or Third or Fourth Wave, but were born with feminism itself; and will only die when feminism dies. Alas, Wilma, there is no sane feminism. </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> Janice Fiamengo</span></div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-60241405960139181392022-09-15T15:10:00.001-04:002022-09-15T15:13:37.351-04:00Objectification or Adoration, Love Poems in the English Renaissance Tradition<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>If
it were true that the history of the west were the history of men
oppressing women, we would expect to find some significant evidence
of such oppression—of male entitlement to women’s bodies, sexual
violence, or indifference to women’s pain—in the literature that
privileged men wrote. </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">We
would expect that some of the most culturally influential men of
their time would at least occasionally reveal their contempt for
women and their pleasure in controlling them.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">What
we encounter instead is a massive body of love poetry stretching back
through the centuries in which extended adoration of the woman and
expressions of dedicated or hopeless yearning form a major component,
and in which the commission of violence is presented as the height of
mental malady, as in Robert Browning’s sinister dramatic monologue
“My Last Duchess” (1842).</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nnk2MFZIyN0" width="320" youtube-src-id="nnk2MFZIyN0"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span></span></span></p><a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: medium;">At
the height of the English love poetry tradition, in the 16th and 17th
centuries—the time of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sir Philip
Sidney (1554-1586), Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), and John Donne
(1752-1631), to name only the most illustrious—there were literally
thousands of love poems written in which the sexual and emotional
power of the female and the delirious joy, wracking self-doubt or
passionate yearning of the male are the central subject.</span><p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>If
such had been written by women about men, we wouldn’t kid ourselves
about their meaning. Here we have one sex focused with amorous
intensity on the other, men obsessed with pleasing, winning, and
paying homage to women. </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>There
is no comparable body of love poetry by women about men despite the
fact that since at least the early 19th century, women have been
active as poets in English. </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">There
are individual love poems or sequences—one thinks of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s Sonnets From the Portugese (1850) including her
famous poem “How Do I Love Thee, Let Me Count the Ways”—but
there is no established convention of female expression of obsessive
love for men’s bodies or minds.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Men’s
love poems run the gamut from joy in wedded bliss to exasperation at
the indifference or cruelty of the beloved, dwelling on the
frustrated desire of the spurned lover or the satisfied desire of the
happy one. Sexual entitlement, coercion of the woman, or
indiscriminate lust are rare to non-existent.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In
John Donne’s magnificent love poem “The Sun Rising” (published
after his death in 1633), the speaker of the poem (the voice we hear)
is so unwilling to get out of the bed he shares with his beloved that
he castigates the sun for its rudeness in shining on them through the
window, commanding the sun in mock exasperation to go elsewhere, and
finally conceding that it makes sense for the sun to focus on his
beloved and him since the center of the universe is in the lovers’
bed:</span></p>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">She's
all states, and all princes, I,</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Nothing
else is.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Princes
do but play us; compared to this,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">All
honor's mimic, all wealth alchemy.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Thou,
sun, art half as happy as we,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">In
that the world's contracted thus.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Thine
age asks ease, and since thy duties be</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">To
warm the world, that's done in warming us.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Shine
here to us, and thou art everywhere;</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">This
bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.</span></span></p></blockquote>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Given
this realization, the speaker ends in grudging yet exultant
submission to the sun’s mandate: “Since thy duties be / To warm
the world, that’s done in warming us. / Shine here to us, and thou
art everywhere; / This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.”
The dramatic exaggerations of language and mood throughout the poem
are a joyful declaration of the effect of love on the speaker.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In
Thomas Wyatt’s mid-16th century sonnet “Whose list to hunt,”
the speaker’s mood is the opposite: he is despondent, having been
fruitlessly pursuing a woman for a long time with no happy ending in
sight. Not only is he making no progress, but he is losing ground,
and others, likely to be no more successful, are running after the
same woman. The voice that speaks in this poem is humiliated and full
of self-disgust, but unable to give up on the woman. Whenever he
tries to leave off, he finds himself wanting her again: “Yet may I
by no means my wearied mind / Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth
afore / Fainting I follow.” The poem is structured around the
extended metaphor of a pointless hunt, with the woman compared to a
deer who won’t be caught—leading feminist critics to moralize
about male dehumanization of women and sexual violence; but it is
clear from the poem that the man has no power to compel the woman, or
even to touch her. Though he is the hunter, he is the one helplessly
caught.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Many
of the sonnet series of this time are about untouchable women.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">One
of the greatest English poets of the late 16th century, Sir Philip
Sidney, wrote a sonnet sequence, dated to 1582, entitled Astrophil
and Stella, comprising 108 sonnets, in which the inaccessibility and
coldness of the woman, and the hopelessness of the poet’s efforts
are already indicated in the title.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Astrophil
combines the Greek words for “star” (Astro) and “lover”
(Phil) (and includes a shortened version of the poet’s name,
Philip) while Stella is the Latin word for star. Astrophil loves
Stella, but she is distant as a star—and all he can do is imagine
ways to provoke her pitying interest in his anguish,</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></p>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Loving
in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">That
she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,—</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Pleasure
might cause her read, reading might make her know,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Knowledge
might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">I
sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;</span></span></p></blockquote>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The
series of mights in the lines emphasize his despair. The collection
of poems overall ruminates on the intensity of unrequited love, and
the connection between desire and poetic creativity.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
</p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In
contrast, Sidney’s poetic rival Edmund Spenser wrote a series of
poems, about 90 sonnets, called the Amoretti, published in 1595, to
describe Spenser’s real-life courtship and marriage, in 1594, to
Elizabeth Boyle. In the final poem in the series, the Epithalamion
(poem in honor of the bride), he lavishly praises his wife’s
physical loveliness, itemizing</span></p>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Her
goodly eyes like Sapphires shining bright </span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Her
forehead ivory white,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Her
cheeks like apples which the sun hath rudded, </span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Her
lips like cherries charming men to byte</span></span></p></blockquote>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">and
so on, but paying ultimate tribute to her “inward beauty,” which
includes her “sweet love and constant chastity.”</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Such
poems praising the beloved often included formulaic descriptions of
the woman’s attractiveness—and/or declare that her beauty of
character outweighs all. This tradition of idealized comparisons
became so familiar in the poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries that
it could be mocked. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, which begins famously
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” plays on the many
comparisons that besotted poets made to celebrate a woman’s beauty.</span></p>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">My
mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Coral
is far more red than her lips' red;</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">If
snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">If
hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">I
have seen roses damasked, red and white,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">But
no such roses see I in her cheeks;</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">And
in some perfumes is there more delight</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Than
in the breath that from my mistress reeks.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">I
love to hear her speak, yet well I know</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">That
music hath a far more pleasing sound;</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">I
grant I never saw a goddess go;</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">My
mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">And
yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">As
any she belied with false compare.</span></span></p></blockquote>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Shakespeare’s
poem admits that his beloved’s hair is more like dark wire than
spun gold, her breath isn’t always sweet, and her breasts are
dun-colored rather than snowy white, but insists that he loves and
desires her anyway: as the final couplet states “And yet, by
heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false
compare” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 130, 1609). The speaker’s tone is
fervent and full of admiration for his human goddess. </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">And
what of the women in these poems, the subjects of so much close
contemplation, wonder, and exasperated longing? Are they merely
objects, disempowered, passive, voiceless? That’s what the feminist
critics allege, and almost no literary analysis today escapes an
overlay of feminist condemnation or skepticism about male love
poetry. But the feminists are wrong.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>The
beloved is often implicitly present in these poems; we not only see
her beauty and learn of her actions but sometimes actually hear her
voice talking back to the poet, responding to him, intellectually
sparring or teasing. </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">The
beloved in Edmund Spenser’s 1595 Sonnet 75 is directly quoted in
the poem chiding the poet-speaker for imagining that he can defeat
death and time with his pen. She mocks him as a “Vain man […]
that dost in vain assay / A mortal thing so to immortalize.”</span></span></p>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">One
day I wrote her name upon the strand,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">But
came the waves and washed it away:</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Again
I wrote it with a second hand,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">But
came the tide, and made my pains his prey.</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">"Vain
man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">A
mortal thing so to immortalize;</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">For
I myself shall like to this decay,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">And
eke my name be wiped out likewise."</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">"Not
so," (quod I) "let baser things devise</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">To
die in dust, but you shall live by fame:</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">My
verse your virtues rare shall eternize,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">And
in the heavens write your glorious name:</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Where
whenas death shall all the world subdue,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Our
love shall live, and later life renew."</span></span></p></blockquote>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">It
is foolish for him to try to make her immortal, she is saying. But
the speaker persists in an elaborate compliment both to himself as
writer and to her: he promises her that “My verse your virtues rare
shall eternize, / And in the heavens write your glorious name.” 400
+ years later, we still know her name—we know she was Elizabeth
Boyle much-admired second wife of Spenser.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">John
Donne’s tour de force lyric poem “The Flea” (1633)—in my
opinion the wittiest and most exuberant love poem ever written—also
dramatically brings to life the woman it addresses. The poem is about
a flea that the poet sees on the arm of his beloved, which having
just sucked his blood, he imagines as a sacrament mingling his blood
with hers in a kind of miniature marriage ceremony. They might as
well consummate the marriage, he suggests erotically, since it has
already, in a sense, occurred. “Mark but this flea,” the would-be
lover says (in other words, take note)—</span></span></p>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Mark
but this flea, and mark in this,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">How
little that which thou deniest me is;</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">It
sucked me first, and now sucks thee,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">And
in this flea our two bloods mingled be;</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Thou
know’st that this cannot be said</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">A
sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Yet
this enjoys before it woo,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">And
pampered swells with one blood made of two,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">And
this, alas, is more than we would do. </span></span></p></blockquote>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">In
response to her persistent lover, the beloved is vibrantly present,
responding to the speaker, disobeying him, co-writing the poem, as it
were. Between the second and third stanzas, she impishly crushes the
flea against his wishes. The poem dramatically bring to life not only
the desire of the speaker for the woman but also her self-confident
sexual power.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Feminist
critics have analyzed such poetry extensively in order to tell us
that we read with our own eyes is not what is really there, and that
these expressions of love and desire are nothing more than
patriarchal objectification, in which the woman is reduced to a thing
to be owned and exploited. </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">But
even in the simplest expressions of the tradition, such an argument
is hard to maintain. Thomas Campion’s 1617 sonnet “There Is a
Garden in Her Face” is typical of the convention of the extended
idealized comparison in which individual features of the woman’s
face are compared to beautiful objects in nature such as flowers,
fruits and precious gems: in this case, we have roses and white
lilies describing her complexion, cherries and at other times
rosebuds as similes for her lips; her teeth are Orient pearls, and so
on. These comparisons, which are at once innocent and erotic are
intended to evoke the sensual attractiveness of the beloved’s face,
and the admiration of a lover who sees no flaw. Here is the middle
stanza of the three-stanza poem.</span></p>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Those
cherries fairly do enclose</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Of
orient pearl a double row,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Which
when her lovely laughter shows,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">They
look like rose-buds fill’d with snow;</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Yet
them nor peer nor prince can buy,</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">Till
“Cherry ripe” themselves do cry.</span></span></p></blockquote>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Cherry
ripe” in the repeated refrain of the stanza’s final line is what
fruit sellers would call to advertise their wares. The poem
emphasizes that no one can possess the woman against her will; she
cannot be kissed until she is ready. The beautiful sounds and images
of the poem combined with its emphasis on the woman’s choice
showcase her power to inspire.</span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Poems
like Campion’s, which were produced, as I said earlier, in the
thousands during the English Renaissance, can be seen as acts of
objectification only if one understands objectification to mean a
form of sacralization in which the poet pays tribute to the woman’s
physical and moral self as precious enough to inspire his most
exalted feats of poetic creation. There is nothing demeaning, quite
the contrary.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>The
tradition of the lover aflame with passion is part of a popular
convention that did not necessarily express the literal reality of
the writers’ lives. But it is impossible to believe that the
convention or style would have had the enduring appeal it did if it
didn’t correspond to the heart experience of generations of men and
women. In this tradition, loving deeply and sometimes suffering the
pangs of unrequited love were an honorable part of male experience;
and women were clearly considered worth suffering for. </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Many
more examples could be given, but those of the most esteemed names in
Renaissance poetry should be adequate to make the case. </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I
will end with a 20th century example, a poem published in 1931, by
the famous American poet e.e. cummings (1894-1962) who updated the
tradition of the love sonnet while keeping many of its essential
features. In “somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond,”
cummings employed paradoxical phrases to evoke the speaker’s
disorientation and wonder, as he turned to new uses the highly
conventional imagery of flowers and unknown territory. In the final
line of the poem, the power of rain to nurture a garden pales in
importance to the small hands of the beloved, whose touch produces an
emotion the speaker cannot fully explain. In using the image of the
rose to describe himself rather than the beloved, the poet freshens
the traditional emphasis of the form while acknowledging the
tenderness that has always been a part of this centuries-old male
tradition.</span></p>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Somewhere
I have never travelled, gladly beyond (1931)</span></p></blockquote>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">somewhere
i have never travelled, gladly beyond</span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">any
experience, your eyes have their silence:</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">in
your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">or
which i cannot touch because they are too near</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">your
slightest look easily will unclose me</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">though
i have closed myself as fingers,</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">you
open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">(touching
skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">or
if your wish be to close me, i and</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">my
life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">as
when the heart of this flower imagines</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">the
snow carefully everywhere descending;</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">nothing
which we are to perceive in this world equals</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">the
power of your intense fragility: whose texture</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">compels
me with the colour of its countries,</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">rendering
death and forever with each breathing</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">(i
do not know what it is about you that closes</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">and
opens; only something in me understands</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">the
voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)</span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-size: medium;">nobody,
not even the rain, has such small hands</span></span></p></blockquote></blockquote>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />
</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Janice Fiamengo</span></p><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-54868153269925270222022-07-15T12:22:00.002-04:002022-07-15T12:23:41.509-04:00Jane Austen’s Anti-Feminism - Janice Fiamengo<div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Although she is now often recruited by feminist critics to make points about women’s limited life choices, preeminent social satirist Jane Austen wrote to oppose the popular proto-feminist ideas of her time, and her warnings about Romantic self-indulgence remain relevant to our own.</span></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fRlOyI5N3zw" width="320" youtube-src-id="fRlOyI5N3zw"></iframe></div><br /><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span><a name='more'></a></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">British novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817), reputed to have given the novel its modern form, is sometimes mischaracterized as a writer of quietly rebellious women’s fiction. Beneath the conventional romance formula, Austen is thought to have been angrily aware of female dependency and of her society’s many restrictions on women’s freedom and self-determination.</span></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0o1r2izN2BPj5vtzxtRykvqVxUSFYhLawTXRpBUu6_xMjE8TuwPXeMaLgeYbXSZu7VV-G-wHur9Gd8QSrknIE4yazorqAZzNnX4K-NlCCCMv_R6hJyDoxXjRJlEjV9UcznvJDEfTGu7J3WYY9JJ3zSjFq-SSqZk9-jTnrE_I6gBEsJ04hP_wnXYcSPQ/s599/p01%20Jane%20Austen.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="599" data-original-width="484" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0o1r2izN2BPj5vtzxtRykvqVxUSFYhLawTXRpBUu6_xMjE8TuwPXeMaLgeYbXSZu7VV-G-wHur9Gd8QSrknIE4yazorqAZzNnX4K-NlCCCMv_R6hJyDoxXjRJlEjV9UcznvJDEfTGu7J3WYY9JJ3zSjFq-SSqZk9-jTnrE_I6gBEsJ04hP_wnXYcSPQ/w162-h200/p01%20Jane%20Austen.png" width="162" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">While it is true that Austen’s happy endings quite often seem fragile and tenuously achieved, and while many of her heroines indeed face loneliness and limitation, Austen was emphatically not a proto-feminist promoting female grievance or rebellion.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In particular, Austen deeply distrusted her era’s emphasis on intense feeling as the ground of morality, an emphasis which placed a sympathetic focus on women as more capable than men of experiencing and expressing emotion. While Austen readily acknowledged that feeling was central to family life and social benevolence, she was acutely aware that unregulated feeling was not only dangerous for individuals, destructive of their happiness, but destructive also of social functioning. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In this essay, I will look briefly at two of Austen’s novels to analyze their implicit commentary on the need to control feeling and to distinguish committed love from emotional indulgence. Alas, the analysis will necessarily involve some simplification of Austen’s subtle and endlessly complex works.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Cultural historians agree in recognizing the second half of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth as an era that emphasized what was then called “sensibility”—the capacity for strong feeling.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Sensibility as understood in its time was a much-debated concept, but was generally recognized as a favorable sign of authenticity and sincerity, a rejection of unnecessary social rules, an assertion of the genuine self. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: large; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6cfJ3cM2SyqjKMnOEz6OJNVFhgxQlsFo37sJMYCKkwxNsNd8tXt7tujcQAkHOJn0dwlj3eWFgYnyz7h2KTjOhdjeIU3gmgZSHRE0nRxSw2yEmUhEFoQvwIsULBmPGRV9kicTty1ZhL3DSVetUZKzJlSGdMb1GcaVDz0UK8J77qeIY1qMoYOLEBTMIJQ/s1360/J.%20Barker-Benfield%20Culture%20of%20Sensibility%2001.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="907" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6cfJ3cM2SyqjKMnOEz6OJNVFhgxQlsFo37sJMYCKkwxNsNd8tXt7tujcQAkHOJn0dwlj3eWFgYnyz7h2KTjOhdjeIU3gmgZSHRE0nRxSw2yEmUhEFoQvwIsULBmPGRV9kicTty1ZhL3DSVetUZKzJlSGdMb1GcaVDz0UK8J77qeIY1qMoYOLEBTMIJQ/w133-h200/J.%20Barker-Benfield%20Culture%20of%20Sensibility%2001.png" width="133" /></a></div><span style="font-size: medium;">Sensibility was also closely related to the nascent feminist movement in that it encouraged and justified women’s assertions and complaints of their sufferings under patriarchy and their demand to be heard. Feminist historian J. Barker-Benfield, in his book The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, stressed the relationship between the emancipation of women and the new valuing of intense feeling, noting that a “central feature of eighteenth-century Britain” was “the aggrandizement of feeling and its investment with moral value” (p. xix). Women, considered naturally more sensitive than men, were also thought to possess a more innate morality. In her treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft both warned against women’s association with sensibility—which she believed was demeaning for women—and employed emotionally charged language and scenarios to heighten the impact of her arguments. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">It is not an exaggeration to say that the 21st century feminist deployment of “virtue in distress” (the distress almost always that of a woman, and caused by the allegedly threatening or harmful actions of a man) can be traced to the eighteenth century, which placed previously unprecedented emphasis on women’s feelings of vulnerability, especially sexual vulnerability, and their demand for empathy. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbZCPTl8LbEM6Cr7FJjcrtEfMXqlRqHgOREPtxflswhrXOq-8uwu-X5Ooc6lYSkaYx4MepgeWkN7takpRmnQhnHOlI5mmIL032nn-F-xCHXb4VHyY2-Q6hQyTOcvpl5IlWzL7uXQSsGSPVerfn14-kLoOX5gHQnlPPxVVBwcTa6-PWPB1tSRzAk2ZSAQ/s565/p05.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="565" data-original-width="353" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbZCPTl8LbEM6Cr7FJjcrtEfMXqlRqHgOREPtxflswhrXOq-8uwu-X5Ooc6lYSkaYx4MepgeWkN7takpRmnQhnHOlI5mmIL032nn-F-xCHXb4VHyY2-Q6hQyTOcvpl5IlWzL7uXQSsGSPVerfn14-kLoOX5gHQnlPPxVVBwcTa6-PWPB1tSRzAk2ZSAQ/w125-h200/p05.png" width="125" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In her earliest novel Sense and Sensibility, written in the mid-1790s but not published until 1811, Jane Austen tackled the problem of sensibility head on, linking it not with sincerity or justified rebellion but with a dangerous irresponsibility and selfishness. The quality was embodied in one of her two main characters, Marianne Dashwood, a moody, impulsive young Romantic, not yet seventeen years old, who has been encouraged by her mother and by the sentimental literature of her day to over-value feeling. She has come to “abhor all concealment” (p. 88), and frequently criticizes her slightly older sister Elinor (who symbolizes the “sense” of the novel’s title) for restraining her emotions, believing that Elinor must not feel very much simply because she does not show feeling in the manner Marianne approves. <br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">On one occasion, responding to a question from her sister, Marianne excuses a thoughtless action by saying that if it had been wrong, it would have felt wrong. “If there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong, and with such a conviction I could have had no pleasure” (Sense and Sensibility, p. 102). Here is a credo of the late 18th century Romantic movement: moment by moment feeling as a moral compass, over-ruling other considerations such as politeness or social propriety. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The central subject of Sense and Sensibility is disappointed love.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEismhm6iJrgvFW4xl_6QIJ42pIg-a2WXpij_BAPOXBLa_kQA8h94UPYv8rQjlRWrxCYjaya6LI7pnxIjYlJ_RFIof0IwrnLCl5W_0fySQMnTJFjMz-407ExEeU0GNrAOY6SV8wfzkyQeepk5mXLcSja90kBse7LZzQZe4eyW9Y19elJQjyypRb2y-rm2w/s1024/p06.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="576" data-original-width="1024" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEismhm6iJrgvFW4xl_6QIJ42pIg-a2WXpij_BAPOXBLa_kQA8h94UPYv8rQjlRWrxCYjaya6LI7pnxIjYlJ_RFIof0IwrnLCl5W_0fySQMnTJFjMz-407ExEeU0GNrAOY6SV8wfzkyQeepk5mXLcSja90kBse7LZzQZe4eyW9Y19elJQjyypRb2y-rm2w/w400-h225/p06.png" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Marianne falls in love with John Willoughby and has her heart broken when he abandons her without explanation. She makes no attempt to control her grief, believing herself fully justified in indulging the sleepless nights, storms of tears, inability to eat, and refusal to see friends or participate in society to which she subjects herself and all those around her. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">She heedlessly encourages her own collapse, finally making herself dangerously ill and never once taking any responsibility for her disastrous involvement with Willoughby. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">It is important to note here that the novel is quite clear that young Marianne has not had a sexual relationship with Willoughby, her impulsiveness being emotional only. But the sexual concern is always present in the novel as a danger for romantic young women; and not coincidentally it emerges in the course of the narrative that Willoughby has actually seduced and abandoned another young woman (and been disinherited as a result, which necessitates his abandonment of Marianne and his engagement to a wealthy heiress). In the world of the novel, if Marianne had allowed herself to have been seduced—as distinct from being raped—she would have been both deeply pitiable and blameworthy. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">There are complex parallels between Marianne and our era’s #MeToo accusers and fainting feminists—those grown women, many in their mid- to late-twenties who, </span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">while energetically declaring their rights as sexually liberated women to be unconstrained by social convention, to shout their abortions or embrace their inner slut yet complain tearfully about an ill-judged joke or unwanted romantic overture—or even an after-the-fact fully consensual, but regretted, affair. Austen would have been amazed by our era’s laxity and self-contradictoriness about sexual relations; in her time, respectable men and women, but especially women for obvious reasons, obeyed strict codes of sexual propriety in speech, dress, and conduct, precisely to avoid the sexual chaos and confusion that are now the norm; Austen would immediately have recognized the danger of basing sexual morality around a woman’s oft-uncertain and changeable feelings. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In Austen’s time, an appropriately modest and chaste young woman would have had every right to complain to her father, brothers, or community members about a man’s crude sexual remark or illicit touch. But a woman who repeatedly flouted codes of sexual behavior could not have expected the same protection and compassion. Austen likely would have found it extraordinary how in our day women who scorn rules about female sexual morality are yet willing and able to invoke them against men, often entirely without compassion or a sense of proportion.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne’s illness shakes her out of her self-infatuation and makes her resolve to act in future with greater maturity and consideration for others. In our era, unfortunately, there is nothing to prevent the constant escalation of women’s self-indulgence. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkcFUvl2AmbH2ikBUNIIy0BZgwnML1pEYWDg4lidOXz50vcSyXTiTB4YhFqhQDtBT81f1ALPFrmra9O-uiX0rnGyCa5HKXeqcAiu2i6XCQUB_x8T22KukFRitXE0wOH9wKKgPerMSxIjlMmSjKZXMrjIsrwlyyrRCa4uH_74KaknMZU3UD-0rJhx3uQg/s1500/Persuasion.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="995" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkcFUvl2AmbH2ikBUNIIy0BZgwnML1pEYWDg4lidOXz50vcSyXTiTB4YhFqhQDtBT81f1ALPFrmra9O-uiX0rnGyCa5HKXeqcAiu2i6XCQUB_x8T22KukFRitXE0wOH9wKKgPerMSxIjlMmSjKZXMrjIsrwlyyrRCa4uH_74KaknMZU3UD-0rJhx3uQg/w133-h200/Persuasion.jpg" width="133" /></a></div>In Austen’s last novel, Persuasion, written while Austen was likely already ill with the untimely disease that would take her life at the age of 42, and published after her death in 1817, the emphasis is placed even more strongly on the importance of emotional maturity, especially the ability to endure unhappiness without self-pity. Nearly every major character in the novel is implicitly judged on their ability, or lack thereof, to make the best of misfortune. A case in point is a relatively minor character, Austen’s satiric masterpiece Mary Musgrove, who is constantly imagining herself ill in order to receive the attention she believes is lacking from her husband and husband’s family; as a result, she creates bad feeling in the family and often drives her husband out of the house to escape her.<br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The novel’s main character, Mary’s sister Anne Elliot, 27 years old, has been living with the unhappy consequences of a mistake made when she was just 19, when she allowed herself to be persuaded to break her engagement with Frederick Wentworth, a young naval officer, whom she deeply loved. Nearly eight years after Frederick was sent away by her, he is back in the neighborhood, now a wealthy naval captain freshly returned from the Napoleonic war. He is ready to fall in love with any appreciative young woman he likes, and determined to show Anne that she no longer has a hold on him. For Anne, seeing him at social gatherings is agony. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Much of the novel focuses on Anne’s determination to control the riot of her feelings; the novel also closely examines the management of feeling in other characters. Visiting Bath with her family, for example, Anne meets up with an old school friend, Mrs. Smith, who is now widowed, impoverished, and ill, but who has, as the novel describes it from Anne’s point of view, “that elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself” (Persuasion, p. 174). In other words, she has found ways to occupy her mind so that she is not overwhelmed by grief. Comparing her friend to the selfish, self-pitying members of her own family, Anne finds this quality “the choicest gift of Heaven” (Persuasion, p. 175). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The phrasing suggests that the gift is a natural at least as much as a cultivated one, but Austen makes the point through other characters that corrupt or decadent ideologies can in themselves decrease our resilience and courage, while the cultivation of stoicism involving the traditional virtues can make us stronger. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">This idea is illustrated on a visit that Anne takes to the seaside town of Lyme with her sister Mary’s family and Captain Wentworth, where Anne finds herself counselling a young naval man, a friend of Wentworth’s named Captain Benwick, whose fiancée died while he was at sea, and who now believes there is no possibility of his ever being happy again. He mentions his attachment to Romantic poetry, naming Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and Lord Byron (1788-1824). Byron in particular was a symbol in Austen’s day for Romantic excess, for indulgence in melancholy rebellion and anti-social self-disgust as modes of authentic selfhood. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The Byronic hero, a figure making a first appearance in 1812 in Byron’s long poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was notoriously attractive for his sexy, brooding, self-destructive intensity, rather like a modern rock star flaming out in beautiful “hopeless agony” (Persuasion, p. 130) at the unbearableness of things. It’s clear from what Benwick says to Anne that he—not unlike Marianne in Sense and Sensibility—has used Byron’s poetry to stoke and affirm his suffering. Anne suggests that he read literature that would help him conquer rather than worsen his depression, mentioning works “calculated to rouse and fortify the mind by the highest precepts, and the strongest examples of moral and religious endurance” (Persuasion, p. 139). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In case the conversation makes Anne seem an unpleasantly rigid moralizer, Austen has her reflect on the irony of her advice:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">“When the evening was over, Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme, to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination” (p. 130). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Austen’s narrator sympathizes with Anne for her inability to entirely conquer her seemingly useless love for Frederick, and honors her for her lonely struggle to do the difficult, right thing. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">For Austen, the fundamental obligation of each individual was to act in accordance with truth, self-respect, and consideration for others. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">I mentioned earlier that modern critics have frequently found proto-feminist statements in Austen, but one of the final scenes in Persuasion, a magnificent narrative climax, reveals the author’s commitment to recognizing the good in men and the moral obligation of each sex to the other. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In this scene, Anne and another of Wentworth’s naval friends, Captain Harville, discuss the question of faithfulness in men and women while Frederick sits nearby writing. Captain Harville’s sister Fanny had been the woman Captain Benwick had been engaged to before she died. Now, just about a year later, Benwick has fallen in love with another woman, and Harville, who is having Benwick’s picture reset for his new betrothed, is caught between happiness for his friend and belief that his sister deserved to be mourned longer. Harville and Anne begin a serious though friendly dispute over whether one sex has a monopoly on faithfulness, with Harville first affirming that his sister would not have forgotten Benwick as quickly as he has forgotten her, and Anne answering him “It would not be the nature of any woman who truly loved” (Persuasion, p. 241). Here Austen emphasizes feeling not as moment-by-moment self-indulgence but as an enduring bedrock of faithful behavior. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In response to Harville’s inquiring look, Anne elaborates with an explanation that has often been quoted as Austen’s most explicit feminist complaint:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">“Yes, we certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions” (Persuasion, p. 241).</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Here, it seems, is the requisite allegation by the woman writer of female confinement and anti-male resentment. And the novel carries it even further in a meta-fictional exchange when Harville objects in response that all literature is against Anne’s position, “I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy” to which Anne answers in a textual moment of authorial wink-winking that she will allow “[…] No reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story […] The pen has been in their hands” (Persuasion, p. 243). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">This is the Austen that feminist critics prefer, wielding her mighty woman’s pen against male cultural dominance. But the scene is not over yet. Harville continues the conversation, defending male faithfulness, and opening his own heart to do so. He describes the life of a naval man, seeing his wife and children back to shore as he prepares to depart on a long voyage of military service from which he may not return. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">“‘If I could but make you comprehend,” he relates, clearly thinking of his own feelings, “what a man suffers when he takes a last look at his wife and children, and watches the boat that he has sent them off in, as long as it is in sight, and then turns away and says, ‘God knows whether we ever meet again!’ And then, if I could convey to you the glow of his soul when he does see them again; when, coming back after a twelvemonth’s absence perhaps, and obliged to put into another port, he calculates how soon it be possible to get them there, pretending to deceive himself, and saying, ‘They cannot be here till such a day,’ but all the while hoping for them twelve hours sooner, and seeing them arrive at last, as if Heaven had given them wings, by many hours sooner still! If I could explain to you all this, and all that a man can bear and do, and glories to do, for the sake of these treasures of his existence! I speak, you know, only of such men as have hearts!” pressing his own with emotion (Persuasion, p. 243). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">And Anne answers him, still maintaining her position about female fidelity but paying tribute to the truth of what he has said: “I hope I do justice to all that is felt by you, and by those who resemble you. God forbid that I should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures. I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman. No, I believe you capable of everything great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as –if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.” (Persuasion, p. 243-244). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">This statement, while not clinching the argument either way, serves as Anne’s indirect declaration of her own continued love for Frederick, which Frederick, sitting nearby writing instructions for Captain Benwick’s picture, conveniently overhears, and from which he takes courage to write a letter renewing his proposal to Anne. Austen thus brings the novel near its close by affirming male goodness, recognizing the particular burdens of each sex, and reiterating the requirement of each to live with justice and understanding toward the other. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Like most conservative moralists, Austen believed that suffering was an irresolvable human constant that emotional self-indulgence could not assuage; for her, living well meant finding a framework of meaning and consolation for pain. The notion that one sex had a monopoly on right feeling was for her the height of self-flattering folly. As Anne said, “I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman”—a clear rebuke of proto-feminist ideology by Austen, who recognized the temptation in the women of her day to believe themselves uniquely put upon and morally superior. Austen would well have understood how easily we arrived at our present moment of feminine self-indulgence.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> Janice Fiamengo</span> </span></div>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-13311906528964667192022-07-15T11:59:00.003-04:002022-07-15T12:02:29.515-04:00Utopianism and Double Standards in Feminist Foremother Mary Wollstonecraft - Janice Fiamengo<div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Let us go even further back in feminist history to the late eighteenth century and the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft, an acclaimed proponent of women’s rights, whose 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is now widely regarded as the founding document of Anglophone feminism. As I will hope to show, Wollstonecraft’s commitment to the Enlightenment principles of equality and reason is at best skin deep, covering over a foundation of anti-male double standards and irrational hostility that forecast all too clearly the next 230 years of female supremacism.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mspgIQosYdU" width="320" youtube-src-id="mspgIQosYdU"></iframe></div><br /><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span><a name='more'></a></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtAe9qMn3PFyD_GDy5u7XxBvZgJkLBoW9ZILx0QZ_7AdPRJmhfz0qY6wgo1J2xLZuasYfHKoxX83Vm-w99VVbaKTXYPEY2MNuU4F5Kgr2ZMrfa-cc93U3HThYlZGTWFhSPdJDpUTxT35jxT8BCTiFFpAjcWtk8ItuWg-6BY87YsDA5cjpvA0emn_L4Ew/s1244/Mary_Wollstonecraft_by_John_Opie_(c._1797).png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1244" data-original-width="1020" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtAe9qMn3PFyD_GDy5u7XxBvZgJkLBoW9ZILx0QZ_7AdPRJmhfz0qY6wgo1J2xLZuasYfHKoxX83Vm-w99VVbaKTXYPEY2MNuU4F5Kgr2ZMrfa-cc93U3HThYlZGTWFhSPdJDpUTxT35jxT8BCTiFFpAjcWtk8ItuWg-6BY87YsDA5cjpvA0emn_L4Ew/w164-h200/Mary_Wollstonecraft_by_John_Opie_(c._1797).png" width="164" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mary Wollstonecraft</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) is a feminist foremother praised by, amongst others, Christina Hoff Sommers, in her book Freedom Feminism (2013), for her egalitarianism. And it is true that Wollstonecraft’s long essay, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, published in 1792 as the French Revolution raged, made the irreproachable claim that women should have the same opportunities to develop their minds as men. As we will see, however, this was only one claim within a framework of now-familiar anti-male denunciation.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In the essay, Wollstonecraft partially agreed with and partially objected to those authors of conduct books and other writings who claimed that women’s main purpose in life was to be a companion to men. Yes, women were men’s companions, Wollstonecraft assented, but they could be so only when they were men’s equals. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqQVDrswHcA6abHjEQqyc9h3tjeeH2R8bg-cgIsN3micyf8jq2ZP7G6W_-kzH7eXMUzFxpU-nYLB8yeGTEJ_NA9atDBvfw6lO0BcShTKtx1XbZgXttA6WKukAL-5Kdg9_Uum7ZpLibns_UFjXFF9pdUgzNm3gDsgVmo2CTxeYYezHePCKOMK61vQlW1w/s1671/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau%20flip.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1671" data-original-width="1200" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqQVDrswHcA6abHjEQqyc9h3tjeeH2R8bg-cgIsN3micyf8jq2ZP7G6W_-kzH7eXMUzFxpU-nYLB8yeGTEJ_NA9atDBvfw6lO0BcShTKtx1XbZgXttA6WKukAL-5Kdg9_Uum7ZpLibns_UFjXFF9pdUgzNm3gDsgVmo2CTxeYYezHePCKOMK61vQlW1w/w144-h200/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau%20flip.png" width="144" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jean-Jacques Rousseau</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">She thus chided political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) whom she otherwise admired, for expecting faithfulness from women who were not allowed to understand why faithfulness really mattered. She asked, “How could Rousseau expect [women] to be virtuous and constant when reason is neither allowed to be the foundation of their virtue, nor truth the object of their inquiries?” (Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, p. 95). Wollstonecraft urged the dramatic expansion of women’s educational and professional opportunities.<br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The problem with 18th century society, according to Wollstonecraft, was that women were in general taught to be attractive rather than good and wise. “The whole tenor of female education tends to render the best disposed romantic and inconstant; and the remainder vain and mean” (A Vindication, p. 79).</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Men made women like this, Wollstonecraft asserted, because men failed to understand women or respect them, “more anxious to make [women] alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers” (A Vindication, p. 6). As a result, “The sex [that is, woman] has been so bubbled by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect” (p. 6). Wollstonecraft further declared that “To be a good mother, a woman must have sense and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands” (A Vindication, p. 160). The progress of civilization itself, according to Wollstonecraft, depended on the proper education of women.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Who could object to women cherishing noble ambitions and becoming worthy of men’s respect, especially as “affectionate wives” and “rational mothers”? Wollstonecraft famously argued for the co-education of women and men on the basis that only when women were equipped with intellectual and economic self-reliance would they be able to truly fulfill their domestic roles: “If marriage be the cement of society, mankind should all be educated after the same model, or the intercourse of the sexes will never deserve the name of fellowship, nor will women ever fulfil the peculiar duties of their sex, till they become enlightened citizens, till they become free by being enabled to earn their own subsistence, independent of men […]” (A Vindication, p. 175).</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">So far, this is all perfectly reasonable, with the rather large problem that Wollstonecraft never did address the significant tensions between what she called the “peculiar duties” of womanhood (in other words, women’s particular role in the family) and the very different masculine roles of public service, political life, academic study and the conduct of business and the professions that she believed should be opened to women. This tension would become one of the major unresolved, and perhaps unresolvable, conundrums of feminist ideology, justifying more and more convoluted demands and allegations in the name of equality; a little more on this later. Yet even Wollstonecraft’s lofty statements about rational education for virtue were buttressed by assumptions far less amenable to reason, not unlike how the commitment by the proponents of the French Revolution to liberty, equality, and fraternity ultimately coexisted with mass repression and violence. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-dBqgUIhqpecB1KPt0QE-IuH_0x4mpC3noqhC7jGIiTuYKHqpi9dny8danmTAfqCps1NIQUhPjbsooV0Y2-MK7_OHYEtIcLy3jLBVzuNLTA0ZcLgWSE31i7FPBv44eOgZX5_CHLjFpUcAYlLHp0Yb6CrX9Y7TZlzhgZTmOteipzbsiUR28eVu-Rj_WQ/s1024/p05.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="764" data-original-width="1024" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-dBqgUIhqpecB1KPt0QE-IuH_0x4mpC3noqhC7jGIiTuYKHqpi9dny8danmTAfqCps1NIQUhPjbsooV0Y2-MK7_OHYEtIcLy3jLBVzuNLTA0ZcLgWSE31i7FPBv44eOgZX5_CHLjFpUcAYlLHp0Yb6CrX9Y7TZlzhgZTmOteipzbsiUR28eVu-Rj_WQ/w400-h299/p05.png" width="400" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><div style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;">The French Revolution, which had begun in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille state prison, is highly relevant to Wollstonecraft’s program of female liberation. As a progressive young intellectual of her time (30 years old when the revolution began), she was deeply attracted to emancipationist projects, especially those that imagined a near-perfect new society arising from the rubble of the old. Wollstonecraft had already established herself as a pro-Revolutionary political writer with her pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Men, which was published in 1790 in angry response to Edmund Burke’s conservative tract Reflections on the Revolution in France. </span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnpzor_o-56leeoDvUGH_6ql71IxjCEy_jP9adYvaCodSaO4tfiOmTxZsqO5XRdLB_7fq5sYIWTd5jcxwoMlLOXuB50uP7gVipqFIbr5i5kQp1nKur12dwPSraViZf8ed1hfRW7pr_vtnUfxmvi4NP7YbHCaw57LBFf_dN8-0E4BlNoyExUoX8_7D8cQ/s2463/Vindication%20Wollstonecraft%2002.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2463" data-original-width="1514" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnpzor_o-56leeoDvUGH_6ql71IxjCEy_jP9adYvaCodSaO4tfiOmTxZsqO5XRdLB_7fq5sYIWTd5jcxwoMlLOXuB50uP7gVipqFIbr5i5kQp1nKur12dwPSraViZf8ed1hfRW7pr_vtnUfxmvi4NP7YbHCaw57LBFf_dN8-0E4BlNoyExUoX8_7D8cQ/w123-h200/Vindication%20Wollstonecraft%2002.png" width="123" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In contrast to Burke’s anti-revolutionary defense of custom and tradition, Wollstonecraft’s vision was radical and utopian, looking to France as a blueprint for the future. Her feminism was possibly influenced, though this is not a certainty, by French feminist Olympe de Gouges, who had published in 1791 a pamphlet called the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, which criticized the failure of the Revolution to liberate women. <br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">De Gouges’s feminism was caustic and condemnatory, describing men as “Bizarre, blind, bloated with science and degenerated […] into the crassest ignorance” (p. 1) and declaring in Article 4 of her Declaration that nothing but “perpetual male tyranny” had kept women from their natural rights (p. 2). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Wollstonecraft was so deeply interested in the transformation of society and female democratic participation that she went to Paris in late 1792 just as the Revolution was entering its most violent and vengeful phase.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN9LxUHCQIQIZh8tmbsVYcqIw0qk7BD_p0xcaejdu18M31TJMbdaSdpffINY1Cddx-vC50kc1BTysh7GGVzNxGPCrYf5tMixcwOkPXJEu6-d4SyguLk4qgIjOoOst3WY_dl4tf01aTw4M_1VfJIhYbzQFZA-s1--6E8PIfl40gCiWIXlH9i7Wcz9gywg/s1100/9_2_orig.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="789" data-original-width="1100" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN9LxUHCQIQIZh8tmbsVYcqIw0qk7BD_p0xcaejdu18M31TJMbdaSdpffINY1Cddx-vC50kc1BTysh7GGVzNxGPCrYf5tMixcwOkPXJEu6-d4SyguLk4qgIjOoOst3WY_dl4tf01aTw4M_1VfJIhYbzQFZA-s1--6E8PIfl40gCiWIXlH9i7Wcz9gywg/w400-h288/9_2_orig.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>Only months after Wollstonecraft arrived in France, the radical Jacobins seized control of the government, determined to eliminate so-called counter-revolutionary forces, which they did by executing at least 17,000 people during the year-long Reign of Terror (not counting the many who died in prison). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4XFpGkhown0tmyT_Poz12TYCHO3o-R6HMTTWO71a61UCrj2N62hDs7NtFDAp5Ay4Qtb-kM0BWTNRyK9FHFkhmQ-SuG2_jRhOT8UNRcGDInpSr1B8nzdQ_b5Jlsre6GgJ3zkNEK8kQEBRtjmViEKxOdkL0d6-p5c8gfcrq-JIiX4LkQsIPQvJ208RyCg/s550/Gironidists.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="415" data-original-width="550" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4XFpGkhown0tmyT_Poz12TYCHO3o-R6HMTTWO71a61UCrj2N62hDs7NtFDAp5Ay4Qtb-kM0BWTNRyK9FHFkhmQ-SuG2_jRhOT8UNRcGDInpSr1B8nzdQ_b5Jlsre6GgJ3zkNEK8kQEBRtjmViEKxOdkL0d6-p5c8gfcrq-JIiX4LkQsIPQvJ208RyCg/w400-h301/Gironidists.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Wollstonecraft, who had allied herself mainly with the more moderate Gironidists, saw friends executed, including Olympe de Gouges, as it happened, and was herself saved from the guillotine by her romantic liaison with the American businessman and diplomat Gilbert Imlay, who registered her with the French authorities as his wife, thus securing her safety as an American. <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDGn_BfxbUklWzSfDP0Os4BBYg8fr4eN03EalJAZa4Gs8y5IQ67yo3qwYbpoQdS6DtsKf_k_jp87U5lEqT17_vjkdMMjhDilNVHuGWkvfJ8Ub8BKI6Y1VFrPF0nvEmej83O1SqGDpn_B5uXILuOFDSM4sn2t3tBqj3_vbD0SRzHt-BzFc9MkecNn4eSw/s360/Gilbert%20Imlay%2005.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="294" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDGn_BfxbUklWzSfDP0Os4BBYg8fr4eN03EalJAZa4Gs8y5IQ67yo3qwYbpoQdS6DtsKf_k_jp87U5lEqT17_vjkdMMjhDilNVHuGWkvfJ8Ub8BKI6Y1VFrPF0nvEmej83O1SqGDpn_B5uXILuOFDSM4sn2t3tBqj3_vbD0SRzHt-BzFc9MkecNn4eSw/w163-h200/Gilbert%20Imlay%2005.png" width="163" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Gilbert Imlay</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Though they didn’t marry, Wollstonecraft fell in love with Imlay and had a child with him; and after he left her, she twice attempted suicide.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Through her turbulent time in France, Wollstonecraft experienced the devastation wrought by revolutionary fervor both personally and politically; years later the costs of Romantic idealism would be lived out in the life stories of her two daughters, Fanny Imlay and Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Yet Wollstonecraft’s commitment to the radical revisioning of society was never extinguished; her 1794 book An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution defended the aims and significance of the revolution despite the many thousands of innocent lives it had destroyed.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written before she went to France, demonstrates Wollstonecraft’s enduring belief that happiness could be achieved by changing society and changing human nature itself; such utopianism, as we’ll see, rested on double standards about male and female behavior that were neither admitted nor justified in the work; and which are now the all-too familiar foundation of feminist ideology.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Wollstonecraft admitted in her book that many women were unintellectual, interested mainly in making themselves attractive and angling for a powerful husband. But she insisted that these were not women’s natural capacities but were rather the signs of their bondage. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">“The education of women has, of late, been more attended to than formerly, yet they are still reckoned a frivolous sex, and ridiculed or pitied by the writers who endeavour by satire or instruction to improve them. It is acknowledged that they spend many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a smattering of accomplishments; meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves—the only way women can rise in the world—by marriage” (Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 9).</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Wollstonecraft even went so far as to allege that women’s abuse of power was really proof of the weakened state in which they were unfairly kept, which alone caused them to develop “cunning” and “a propensity to tyrannize” (A Vindication, p. 10).</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Some feminists have been disappointed in Wollstonecraft for not directly asserting the intellectual equality of women with men. However, what Wollstonecraft lacked in insistence on equality, she more than made up for in man-blaming. Confessing to have avoided “any direct comparison of the two sexes collectively, or frankly acknowledging the inferiority of woman, according to the present appearance of things,” she emphasized that, </span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;">“I shall only insist that men have increased that inferiority till women are almost sunk below the standard of rational creatures. Let their faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale” (A Vindication, p. 35). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Elaborating what would become in the 20th century the theory of social constructionism, Wollstonecraft implied that it was impossible to say at the present time what woman might be and do if only given the chance.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Whatever defects women showed at present were first and foremost caused, she explained, by the unjust and irrational expectations of men:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">“Why do men halt between two opinions, and expect impossibilities?” she asked, “Why do they expect virtue from a slave, from a being whom the constitution of civil society has rendered weak, if not vicious?” She went on to predict that it would take a long time to change social prejudices: “It will also require some time to convince women that they act contrary to their real interest on an enlarged scale, when they cherish or affect weakness under the name of delicacy, and to convince the world that the poisoned source of female vices and follies […] has been the sensual homage paid to beauty:- to beauty of features; for it has been shrewdly observed by a German writer, that a pretty woman, as an object of desire, is generally allowed to be so by men of all descriptions; whilst a fine woman, who inspires more sublime emotions by displaying intellectual beauty, may be overlooked or observed with indifference, by those men who find their happiness in the gratification of their appetites” (A Vindication, p. 49).</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Who could blame women, Wollstonecraft stressed in the above passage, for wanting to be beautiful and for not caring about virtue when men uniformly celebrated beauty and often ignored or even slighted virtue? Here Wollstonecraft came close to fundamental matters in the nature of male and female desire, but she fatally weakened her argument by giving the most damning interpretation possible of men’s actions and by excusing women from any accountability. According to Wollstonecraft, there was in men’s attraction to beautiful young women nothing healthy and nothing benign. It was merely “sensual,” a gross physical appetite. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">As in nearly all future feminist analyses of the relationship between men and women, Wollstonecraft depicted women as reacting to a situation entirely created by men for men that they, women, had played no role in supporting. Whether women tended to prefer certain qualities in the men they married—Wollstonecraft wouldn’t say and didn’t care. So focused was she on identifying how men turned women into “slaves,” as she repeatedly called them, that she refused to recognize any form of female agency or limitations on male freedom. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Even clear demonstrations of female sexual power were interpreted by Wollstonecraft as evidence of their degradation. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">“I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions, which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority. It is not condescension to bow to an inferior. So ludicrous, in fact, do these ceremonies appear to me, that I scarcely am able to govern my muscles, when I see a man start with eager, and serious solicitude, to lift a handkerchief, or shut a door, when the lady could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two” (A Vindication, p. 60). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Indeed, the woman could have done it herself, but didn’t. Is the man truly degrading the woman when he performs actions of obeisance for her? Wollstonecraft’s argument refused to recognize male need, solicitude, or protectiveness because these would complicate the stark picture she was painting. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Wollstonecraft continually mocked the idea that women wanted or needed male protection, or that such protection ever came as a benefit to women or at a real cost to men themselves: “In the most trifling dangers, they [women] cling to their [male] support with parasitical tenacity, piteously demanding succour; and their natural protector extends his arm, or lifts up his voice, to guard the lovely trembler—from what? Perhaps the frown of an old cow, or the jump of a mouse” (A Vindication, p. 65). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Were women, then, for their own moral good, to be left defenceless in cases of actual danger—a charging bull, a venomous snake, or a sinking ship? </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Wollstonecraft ignored such a question, focusing instead on minor acts of gallantry that she regarded as sexist insults. “When a man squeezes the hand of a pretty woman, handing her to a carriage, whom he has never seen before, she will consider such an impertinent freedom in the light of an insult, if she have any true delicacy, instead of being flattered by this unmeaning homage to beauty” (A Vindication, p. 104). In Wollstonecraft’s view—what became the standard feminist view of so-called “benevolent sexism”—all male expressions of attraction to women were merely means to subordinate them.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Like many feminists who came after, Wollstonecraft envisioned a fantastical redeemed world in which the passions of both sexes would be reformed, divorced from any bedrock in human nature—a nature that Wollstonecraft, in line with other Lockean philosophers of her time, saw as highly malleable. In her utopian realm, men would cease to be attracted by a woman’s physical beauty and women would cease to be pleased by male deference or attracted to male power; she even went so far as to allege that once possessing their own abilities in the educational and professional spheres, women would never exploit their sexuality or tryst with “rakish” men (p. 124). Wollstonecraft’s own self-destructive romantic choices—of the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, and before him of the already-married Swiss artist Henry Fuseli—did not seem to have been lessened by her highly developed<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnVvSxCMQ_c8J-F4EpMl3bzh9LC6PXbZzTl3yXTk8sfLLtTpeHQGLcdFacuAwQfWJYSg9FrVOgR_JaTYLTKgdmNYTXEVTZKWFiicuKt_VJRlukZ3ViV8lkZKYxIIeB7o2XB0Et6FwARokznSOr13cx2vU91wTdCqZH2v4WSNVdBpVDYm9dS2MzHD7CpA/s2885/Henry_Fuseli_by_James_Northcote%2002.png" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2885" data-original-width="2400" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnVvSxCMQ_c8J-F4EpMl3bzh9LC6PXbZzTl3yXTk8sfLLtTpeHQGLcdFacuAwQfWJYSg9FrVOgR_JaTYLTKgdmNYTXEVTZKWFiicuKt_VJRlukZ3ViV8lkZKYxIIeB7o2XB0Et6FwARokznSOr13cx2vU91wTdCqZH2v4WSNVdBpVDYm9dS2MzHD7CpA/w166-h200/Henry_Fuseli_by_James_Northcote%2002.png" width="166" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Henry Fuseli</td></tr></tbody></table><br /> intellectuality or financial independence. But like most feminists, she could not or would not look squarely at how her wayward and passionate impulses contradicted her idealized imaginings of female rectitude.<br /><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">She believed in the potential of radical ideas to reform the world, even that ideas could cure women of such faults as romanticism and infidelity: “Were women more rationally educated, could they take a more comprehensive view of things, they would be contented to love but once in their lives; and after marriage calmly let passion subside into friendship” (A Vindication, p. 125). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">As if this denial of female nature were not outlandish enough, Wollstonecraft even made the argument that when women were independent from men, they would be more affectionate and faithful. “Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers—in a word, better citizens. We should then love them with true affection, because we should learn to respect ourselves” (A Vindication, p. 158). Notably, Wollstonecraft did not explain how independence and opportunity would make women more rather than less content in their domestic duties, or more inclined to be affectionate and faithful to the beings she had characterized throughout her treatise as bigoted and exploitative. Men were simply to accept Wollstonecraft’s undefended pledge. “Make [women] free and they will quickly become wise and virtuous” (A Vindication, p. 186). </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The only point on which Wollstonecraft’s treatise does not predict later feminism is in her insistence that education should inculcate in women the domestic virtues of marital fidelity, motherhood, companionability, responsibility for raising children, and care of the household; all of these drop away almost entirely from later feminist discussions. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">But exactly what virtue would look like in women and how it would be encouraged or enforced are left conveniently vague in Wollstonecraft’s treatise, which seemed unwilling to admit that greater freedom alone would not improve women’s characters. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Wollstonecraft was not prepared to consider that women were at least as likely as men to abuse power, especially if they could do so under cover of the innocent victimhood that Wollstonecraft and many others so assiduously promoted. “Depressed from their cradles” (p. 201) as Wollstonecraft claimed women were, they could not be held responsible for their failures or bad actions. 230 years later, with women vastly outnumbering men at Anglophone universities and outpacing men in many areas of employment, we are still waiting for the time so long deferred when the moment of women’s moral accounting will at last arrive.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span> </span>Janice Fiamengo</span></div><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-43878887934896345662022-05-15T14:21:00.000-04:002022-05-15T14:21:10.769-04:00Female Privilege on the Titanic - The Fiamengo File 2.0<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>During
the Titanic disaster of 1912, men secured lifeboat seats for women
and children, and those men who survived the sinking were grilled in
the U.S. Senate about why they weren’t dead. The traditional notion
that men owed women protection, and women owed men gratitude, was
generally confirmed by the behavior of passengers and crew. The
feminist response to the sinking, however, was to deny that women
owed men anything, and to express outrage that men had never yet done
enough for them. </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uPdrsdoJfz8" width="320" youtube-src-id="uPdrsdoJfz8"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span><a name='more'></a></span><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The
allegedly unsinkable British steamship Titanic sank in the early
hours of April 15th after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic
Ocean only 5 days into its maiden voyage from Southampton, England to
New York City.</span><p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>As
we now know, the ship’s bulkhead compartments were constructed in
such a manner that water could pour from one bulkhead compartment
into another, and this was exactly what happened after the iceberg
caused a 300-foot breach in the Titanic’s hull. The inadequate
number of lifeboats, and the fact that most lifeboats were launched
only about half full during the haphazard evacuation, meant that
close to two-thirds of the Titanic’s passengers, the vast majority
men, died in the disaster. </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: large; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiBj5CVaunaQZ8ODZlrXiafKl_VVHJQKe0URYTZNKjTF9yr1iui1IJpAajUfk9zpEOlEPWTh7a0g13F0o2j8ej7TWFqsZ8RTZ_r-n8MjAKj2J2IQwO6c6yYTu4XUIgBMh9zuYlxDqhnR9sLgfMLgACmfSAaOXbVv68WIv7HR1mlT0vwz0BY-jS8hwcDw/s2048/Titanic%2001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1152" data-original-width="2048" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiBj5CVaunaQZ8ODZlrXiafKl_VVHJQKe0URYTZNKjTF9yr1iui1IJpAajUfk9zpEOlEPWTh7a0g13F0o2j8ej7TWFqsZ8RTZ_r-n8MjAKj2J2IQwO6c6yYTu4XUIgBMh9zuYlxDqhnR9sLgfMLgACmfSAaOXbVv68WIv7HR1mlT0vwz0BY-jS8hwcDw/w400-h225/Titanic%2001.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">The
last wireless message of the Titanic reported that the ship was
“Sinking by the head. Have cleared boats and filled them with women
and children.” Women and Children First was the law of the sea, and
many newspaper accounts of the disaster emphasized the stories of
individual men who helped others and accepted their own deaths
stoically. Many of these stories reported by survivors are almost
inconceivably poignant.</span><p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Millionaire
businessman Benjamin Guggenheim was one. Survivor Rose Icard recorded
in a letter how, after assisting with the lifeboats, he “got
dressed and put a rose at his buttonhole, to die.” </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: large; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8oibrcUgQszzOBLTImNBJHfyInJfZyrMdPrs7jGtgvEGfzRFfrV546kd9vjwBYJsC7xqwnw-Jfkc17X7ZIqz0YweXrtE4I4UJVWP-lRSqAUsWvDjgGBJCRGxRQL69CGXNdiG-OhR0Ayqtd8kUywkqdv_anh_4QgKmAKBrsMc7cJaUuDA-yn1tkBYIrg/s850/p03.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="850" height="189" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8oibrcUgQszzOBLTImNBJHfyInJfZyrMdPrs7jGtgvEGfzRFfrV546kd9vjwBYJsC7xqwnw-Jfkc17X7ZIqz0YweXrtE4I4UJVWP-lRSqAUsWvDjgGBJCRGxRQL69CGXNdiG-OhR0Ayqtd8kUywkqdv_anh_4QgKmAKBrsMc7cJaUuDA-yn1tkBYIrg/w400-h189/p03.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">He
sent a message to his wife through his cabin steward Henry Etches,
“Tell my wife in New York that I’ve done my best in doing my
duty.”</span><p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Business
magnate Colonel John Jacob Astor, the richest person on board the
ship and considered one of the richest men in the world, was last
seen on the ship’s deck smoking a cigarette with American mystery
writer Jacques Futrelle. He had just helped his wife, pregnant with
their first child, into the last lifeboat and kissed her goodbye.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9BjljcAJyjq-cESr_-_RB82Yzg97a3NM40DH00eGwEpJA9DqQZzymNIRuW6Gulej3qvjI87SGbB0d18OJBvbQPMG6YrGzasgVpL7SSBZSxHu29NUQ-XqnjuzLwZFomc11tC1Q8IkWM9kYaTU3fKvqdq7vQhEXt6yDBY35MxvCMvucyGdc5RdLCPkiww/s525/p04%20John%20Jacob%20Astor%20b.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="525" data-original-width="476" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9BjljcAJyjq-cESr_-_RB82Yzg97a3NM40DH00eGwEpJA9DqQZzymNIRuW6Gulej3qvjI87SGbB0d18OJBvbQPMG6YrGzasgVpL7SSBZSxHu29NUQ-XqnjuzLwZFomc11tC1Q8IkWM9kYaTU3fKvqdq7vQhEXt6yDBY35MxvCMvucyGdc5RdLCPkiww/w181-h200/p04%20John%20Jacob%20Astor%20b.png" width="181" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">John Jacob Astor</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">It
was likely that some or many of the men who died did not wish to
perform acts of gallantry. Many knew that they would encounter
persistent shaming back home if they managed to get a life-boat seat.
Others by nature and by training were dedicated to living out their
duty even unto death.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The
passenger survival rate told the story (see <a href="#Survivors_and_victims">Wikipedia</a>
page). Of first-class passengers, 97% of the women as compared to 33%
of the men survived. Of second-class passengers, 86% of the women and
only 8% of the men survived; in steerage, the women did less well
than other women—with 46% surviving—but still had a significantly
higher chance of surviving than the wealthiest and most privileged
man. Men in steerage, like all other men, had a low survival rate at
16%. Perhaps notably, children overall fared somewhat less well than
the women; though 100% of children in second-class survived, only 83%
in first-class and 34% in third-class escaped death. (In total, only
1 in 5 men survived; 3 out of 4 women did.)</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span></span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmqF_CSYFxVxaGjCBpzXC73Mtn3-55vvXrix686EuZyXdhccngq14nWkdRRHWVK_Mnw2q6fTkddxEFgFpnzSnyFlbp89nLBC-Ow2tqkoMR1q6Cf7w_2lkFXPw4HIdPTMWu20hmAN0HTbcivVwDD0qyGJ6XRD77gMg3fMGn_eCqCP40XkXpFk0s-3lH8w/s1913/SH%20220515%206963.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1072" data-original-width="1913" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmqF_CSYFxVxaGjCBpzXC73Mtn3-55vvXrix686EuZyXdhccngq14nWkdRRHWVK_Mnw2q6fTkddxEFgFpnzSnyFlbp89nLBC-Ow2tqkoMR1q6Cf7w_2lkFXPw4HIdPTMWu20hmAN0HTbcivVwDD0qyGJ6XRD77gMg3fMGn_eCqCP40XkXpFk0s-3lH8w/w400-h224/SH%20220515%206963.png" width="400" /></a></span></span></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span><br />For
many of those who reflected after the event on the meaning of the
Titanic, the age-old verities of self-sacrificing men and protected
women seemed obvious; </span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: arial;">and
this element of the Titanic saga has been ably, if somewhat
skeptically, reported by Steven Biel in his 1996 book </span><i style="font-family: arial;">Down With
the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster. </i><span style="font-family: arial;">In
this essay, I rely heavily on Biel’s book, which I recommend as a
fascinating source of information, though I regret that Biel seemed
to find it<br /> necessary to be somewhat sneering in reporting on what he
calls Titanic “myths,” including the myth of male chivalry.</span></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxIyGu0raOwlaXJUtmkrsIAFVbRMpRdzFJ_nCFwmglOdFyxz5RCZo0b0lQhPmfX_FObToNg1WbMd_3_VTtkKw3ACBqjf_sr8Tc_sJvgyc5dYjEzvMqlBQ7CAioec2e_RcTa6kcKEnppUOiUYM2xXHp5b5xnuH3gviitTgXvLO-2-gt6_kzopBk7IoSTg/s630/p05.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="417" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxIyGu0raOwlaXJUtmkrsIAFVbRMpRdzFJ_nCFwmglOdFyxz5RCZo0b0lQhPmfX_FObToNg1WbMd_3_VTtkKw3ACBqjf_sr8Tc_sJvgyc5dYjEzvMqlBQ7CAioec2e_RcTa6kcKEnppUOiUYM2xXHp5b5xnuH3gviitTgXvLO-2-gt6_kzopBk7IoSTg/w133-h200/p05.png" width="133" /></a></div><p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">As
Biel notes, many commentators emphasized the gendered division
between those who sacrificed and those who were saved: an editorial
for <i>Collier’s</i> magazine argued that the behavior of the men
on board showed that there was more to patriarchy than simply the
rule of the stronger over the weaker; there was also the duty of care
for the weaker: “Power and trust carry with them, in emergencies,
the privilege to be self-forgetful and to die” wrote the Collier’s
editorialist (qtd in Biel, p. 27).</span></span></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>At
a time when agitation by feminists for the right to vote was
widespread in both England and the United States, many who wrote
editorials or wrote letters to newspaper hoped that the angry
activists were paying attention and drawing the correct lesson, which
was that a benevolent patriarchy protected women, and secured their
interests, far more effectively than the mere right to vote ever
could. The editors of the <i>Baltimore Sun</i> emphasized that "The
action of the men on the Titanic was not exceptional. But it must be
recognized as an act of supreme heroism, and as showing that women
can appeal to a higher law than that of the ballot for justice, consideration, and protection" (quoted in Biel, p.30). <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Yjbhw6bhPNQamOSlzpPUDU-1RYbwBLF6q50WaMEMTBg21Frr4CEL64eIyQqdnsxt0LGJsgr_B89lv0kSon3BhZGyMud66ftTDYLCygegAB8ZzcGGRBzDqR5Z_POiTowxiv-2ht4cg1MNfhCJIPotj_DrLgrleb5McDlVQ721R1H28MfxfWu4qk7daQ/s600/Steven%20Biel.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="500" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Yjbhw6bhPNQamOSlzpPUDU-1RYbwBLF6q50WaMEMTBg21Frr4CEL64eIyQqdnsxt0LGJsgr_B89lv0kSon3BhZGyMud66ftTDYLCygegAB8ZzcGGRBzDqR5Z_POiTowxiv-2ht4cg1MNfhCJIPotj_DrLgrleb5McDlVQ721R1H28MfxfWu4qk7daQ/w167-h200/Steven%20Biel.png" width="167" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Steven Biel</td></tr></tbody></table></span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Other
commentators asked the question that has never, to my knowledge, been
honestly and satisfactorily answered by any feminist: if equality
means equal suffering and death at times of crisis—which it must
do, if it is really equality—then do women want equality? And if
women do not want that kind of equality, why do they repeatedly
pretend they do? </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">One
letter writer calling himself Mere Man asked the question: “Would
the suffragette have stood on that deck for women’s rights or for
women’s privileges?” Reverend W.S. Plumer Bryan drew a similar
conclusion for feminists: “The women who are demanding political
rights may well take care, lest they lose what is infinitely dearer,”
he warned. “If men and women are to be rivals, can she expect such
chivalrous protection as the women of the Titanic received?” (qtd
in Biel, p. 31).</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Members
of the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage pointed out
that the women who went into the lifeboats, whatever they might say
about equality in other contexts, were not feminists:</span></span></p>
</div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>"[…]
When the final crash came men and women alike were unanimous in
making the sex distinction. It was not a question of “Voters
first,” but the cry all over the ship was “Women first!” In
acquiescing to that cry, the women admitted that they were not fitted
for men’s tasks. They did not think of the boasted ‘equality’
in all things. This is not an implication that women were inferior,
it just shows an inequality or a difference. (qtd. in Biel, p.
32).</span></span></span></p></div></blockquote><div>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Immediately
after the disaster, many women wanted to express their gratitude for
male protectiveness. Within a few weeks, the Women’s Titanic
Memorial Fund was organized by American women to build a monument in
tribute to manhood; it raised half a million dollars through
donations, including from Titanic survivor Mrs. Archibald Forbes, who
had played bridge with John Jacob Astor on the night of the sinking. </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Featuring
a statue sculpted by John Horrigan, the <a href="https://www.historicamerica.org/journal/2014/10/9/the-womens-titanic-memorial-of-washington-dc">Women’s
Titanic Memorial</a> was unveiled in 1931 and now stands in
Washington, DC. </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>The
monument is dedicated “To the brave men who perished in the wreck
of the Titanic April 15, 1912. They gave their lives that women and
children might be saved.” An editorial described it as a monument
“from the weaker to the stronger, from the grateful to the gallant,
from the saved to the saver of life” (qtd. in Biel, p. 37). </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span></span></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi4-VvmbnlhND_VwVd2htbj-G-F4125sgfDG4LUsaWi5cbP6CR6_0T_zhUMndFbMhxikyMWXF7Heri47lNUje7txf_sMCXFTs8XH4kmeUUTH-kIIwWXle-3DkCWjf_vGpkFbvo3dE8mFvJOCfO_B4b9R37s6L9k2_8Kx7eSB0vcBP0LKvAb6f64iTxXA/s1595/Womens%20Titanic%20Memorial%20statue.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1044" data-original-width="1595" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi4-VvmbnlhND_VwVd2htbj-G-F4125sgfDG4LUsaWi5cbP6CR6_0T_zhUMndFbMhxikyMWXF7Heri47lNUje7txf_sMCXFTs8XH4kmeUUTH-kIIwWXle-3DkCWjf_vGpkFbvo3dE8mFvJOCfO_B4b9R37s6L9k2_8Kx7eSB0vcBP0LKvAb6f64iTxXA/w400-h261/Womens%20Titanic%20Memorial%20statue.png" width="400" /></a></span></span></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span><br />Not
surprisingly, however, not all women of the time expressed gratitude
towards men, and many refused even to modify their anti-male
denunciations in the days and weeks following the wreck. One letter
writer didn’t like the fact that the Women’s Titanic Memorial
Fund was dedicated to male heroes, asking “Why not, instead of
having the memorial solely for the heroes of the wreck, have it also
for the heroines!” She had missed the point that it was only men
who had died, and died in such numbers, <i>because </i>of their sex
and <i>for</i> women and children (qtd. in Biel, p. 54). </span></span>
</span><p></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Another
woman simply refused to accept that men had behaved heroically,
asserting in a letter to the <i>Baltimore Sun</i> that much if not
all of the alleged heroism “was due to the belief in the unsinkable
qualities of the ship” or to the part “pistols played in
converting cowards into brave men” (qtd in Biel, p. 107). It wasn’t
enough for her that the men were dead; it was necessary for her to
deflate the praise being offered, emphasizing either male ignorance
or compulsion. </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrA2CNe2zFP1OMNO5tWTBRtUMuojO7KrPomWcHI5OpSoSoNNMUlsz2_SrZWzbW_A2iayfWDPfq0UMemcRxWxQ9YtrhjIqJg8ZjY0RCY6F6PDGVkUgkk0e9IgLRfMtT_FbnMR1vusKIz0_9_WpCCdqbPG57bwidzkTNK8ZVissDWtcjsEW1_ZoVT6oJYA/s373/p10%20Alice%20Stone%20Blackwell%2003.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="373" data-original-width="269" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrA2CNe2zFP1OMNO5tWTBRtUMuojO7KrPomWcHI5OpSoSoNNMUlsz2_SrZWzbW_A2iayfWDPfq0UMemcRxWxQ9YtrhjIqJg8ZjY0RCY6F6PDGVkUgkk0e9IgLRfMtT_FbnMR1vusKIz0_9_WpCCdqbPG57bwidzkTNK8ZVissDWtcjsEW1_ZoVT6oJYA/w144-h200/p10%20Alice%20Stone%20Blackwell%2003.png" width="144" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alice Blackwell</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Other
feminist commentators simply glossed over the significance of male
sacrifice, twisting the meaning of the disaster to make it about the
need to empower women politically.</span></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Alice
Stone Blackwell, editor of the North American Woman Suffrage
Association’s publication, the <i>Woman’s Journal</i>,
acknowledged that some men had acted chivalrously but called for a
“new chivalry” — allegedly a chivalry for all — that could only
come about when women had political power because true chivalry was a
characteristic of women rather than men (qtd. in Biel, p. 104). She
made her claim by focusing solely on the suffering of women and
girls: </span></span>
</span></p>
</div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><div><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">“<span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>The
chivalry shown to a few hundred women on the Titanic,” she wrote,
“does not alter the fact that in New York City 150,000
people—largely women and children—have to sleep in dark rooms
with no windows; that in a single large city 5,000 white slaves
[prostitutes] die every year; that the lives and health of thousands
of women and children are sacrificed continually through their
exploitation in mills, workshops and factories. These things are
facts.” </span></span></span></p></div></blockquote><div>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">As
feminist always do, she quickly diverted attention from an actual
instance of extraordinary male generosity to an alleged instance of
male indifference, focusing solely on the suffering of poor women and
girls, ignoring or denying that of boys and men who certainly
suffered at least equally as a result of poverty, industrial
exploitation, and unhealthy living and working conditions. Her claim
that women were more generally chivalrous than men was contradicted
in her failure to consider any of the ways that men and boys also
needed help.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Other
commentators used a different but equally standard feminist tactic in
blaming men for the Titanic accident, claiming that it was men’s
fault the ship had sunk and alleging that once women had more power,
accidents at sea would rapidly diminish or cease altogether.</span></span></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="font-family: arial;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; font-size: large;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsCJQ2b6Uin-lWVuvtac0CLp3FrJv_0gWESushkesIAC4MdtMDhlHCS6NKh3L1OdeyuvvXNAHpMi8JBZw8vN3erYP0BeyCjjq3g5vh0RlbZq_oRfKDzrrgO4wg8G9bKZSCideqHGz1SzDDUHC_t2j7yEKMszAs-oEmhS9HBf3bmj7mSBVwe86h7gSS0A/s633/p11%20Agnes%20Ryan%2002.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="633" data-original-width="389" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsCJQ2b6Uin-lWVuvtac0CLp3FrJv_0gWESushkesIAC4MdtMDhlHCS6NKh3L1OdeyuvvXNAHpMi8JBZw8vN3erYP0BeyCjjq3g5vh0RlbZq_oRfKDzrrgO4wg8G9bKZSCideqHGz1SzDDUHC_t2j7yEKMszAs-oEmhS9HBf3bmj7mSBVwe86h7gSS0A/w123-h200/p11%20Agnes%20Ryan%2002.png" width="123" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Agnes Ryan</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-size: medium;">Agnes
Ryan wrote for the afore-mentioned <i>Woman’s Journal</i> that
“Wholesale, life-taking disasters must almost be expected” as
long as “the laws and the enforcement of the laws are entirely in
men’s hands.” She was convinced that “the Votes for Women
movement seeks to bring humanness [and] the valuation of human life,
into the commerce and transportation and business of the world and </span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">establish things on a new basis, a basis in which the unit of measurement is life, nothing but life!” Women cared about life, allegedly, men only about money. </span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span></span></span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>The
previously mentioned Alice Blackwell sounded the same fantastical
note, asserting that “There was no need that a single life should
have been lost upon the Titanic” and claiming that “There will be
far fewer lost by preventable accidents, either on land or sea, when
the mothers of men have the right to vote” (qtd in Biel, p. 105). </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Exploiting
this absurd argument based on collective blame and female salvation,
some feminists thought sacrificing themselves for the women was the
least the men could have done. “After all,” wrote one letter
writer, “the women on the boat were not responsible for the
disaster,” so it was only right that men should reap the rewards of
male cupidity and irresponsibility (qtd in Biel, p. 107). </span></span>
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBpjmn0HN72VmjFUndk6p0edTuyq-2raA_CG0aFQBMzSaA4oUcDtayHRzjsFxM7voVVUQSN7H8_4SVq-oNSlgSEOquPtDmjajkuzwlcFYMeaD5Nv-MM_pl2p9CPFkNZVRUHKWZqljj1J1h2-BouULv1g1RVUPElfPLbVJqfHj6Phqp5VvudI7vl3ryCg/s900/p12%20Emma%20Goldman%2002.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="640" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBpjmn0HN72VmjFUndk6p0edTuyq-2raA_CG0aFQBMzSaA4oUcDtayHRzjsFxM7voVVUQSN7H8_4SVq-oNSlgSEOquPtDmjajkuzwlcFYMeaD5Nv-MM_pl2p9CPFkNZVRUHKWZqljj1J1h2-BouULv1g1RVUPElfPLbVJqfHj6Phqp5VvudI7vl3ryCg/w143-h200/p12%20Emma%20Goldman%2002.png" width="143" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Emma Goldman</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The
only well-known feminist who made an equality argument about the
disaster was the Anarchist activist Emma Goldman, who was lecturing
in Denver, Colorado when news of the Titanic first broke. Goldman was
primarily a political agitator who advocated for birth control and
free love so that women could join their brother workers in
dedicating themselves to revolution. She castigated the women who
accepted men’s offer of sacrifice because by doing so, they showed
themselves the physical and moral children that they still were. They
should have died like their men, she declared (qtd in Biel, p.
101-02).</span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYAO-u6Owyj_0k5oxbUan_B4D5sj3g5e9KqWjXWuq7WqUSL0dQOm9OSTshfOTXxZaoOmkdNptJzqKArYD2jWNY07djXK7Q0030vhtWSWX8if7SKSCx0ReEtOaYX34bCpdsAt8C6li5WP0Q8knB94lMTDrkRw9DzLaYNf_MHyjffqeV9OpAsxcktLZm8Q/s2500/Isidor%20and%20Ida%20Strauss%2002.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2500" data-original-width="1884" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYAO-u6Owyj_0k5oxbUan_B4D5sj3g5e9KqWjXWuq7WqUSL0dQOm9OSTshfOTXxZaoOmkdNptJzqKArYD2jWNY07djXK7Q0030vhtWSWX8if7SKSCx0ReEtOaYX34bCpdsAt8C6li5WP0Q8knB94lMTDrkRw9DzLaYNf_MHyjffqeV9OpAsxcktLZm8Q/w151-h200/Isidor%20and%20Ida%20Strauss%2002.png" width="151" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Isidore and Ida Strauss</td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In
fact, it is known that one woman, Ida Strauss, did refuse to leave
her husband, millionaire businessman and co-owner of Macy’s
Department Store Isidor Strauss. The couple perished together in
their cabin. It’s not known if any other women made the decision to
stay back with men they loved; many, faced with the terror of the icy
blackness, probably kissed their husbands good-bye and hoped that it
might not be for the last time.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: arial;">There
is something uncomfortable in moralizing about the Titanic or about
any instance of male sacrifice. Undoubtedly most of us would wish to
live in a society where no one is forced to make such choices or to
prove their worthiness by dying—as only men ever must do. But the
awkward question does arise: do feminists advocate equality in
self-sacrifice? Would the feminists refuse the lifeboats? And having
accepted the metaphorical lifeboat that modern society offers women,
how much longer can feminists continue in their refusal of gratitude
and insistence on male privilege? Too many modern feminists sound
exactly like those who thought that dying to save women was the very
least the men could do. </span></span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: arial;"> Janice Fiamengo</span></span></p><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span></div>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-90984818963189067492022-05-10T11:32:00.000-04:002022-05-10T11:32:17.538-04:00Nineteenth-Century Novelist Henry James Predicted Twentieth-Century Feminism<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In 1914, a newly painted portrait of
American novelist Henry James was attacked by a suffragette wielding
a meat cleaver. It’s not clear whether the target was the painting
or the novelist himself. It’s possible that the suffragette had
been enraged by James’s 1886 masterpiece, <i>The Bostonians</i>, a
work that rivals the writings of Ernest Belfort Bax as the
Anglosphere’s most prescient nineteenth-century analysis of the
doctrine of female supremacism.
</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: large;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RhT4rCi7pKY" width="320" youtube-src-id="RhT4rCi7pKY"></iframe></div><br /><span><a name='more'></a></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Henry James (1843-1916) was, in the
early 20<sup>th</sup><span> century, easily the foremost living
English-language novelist; he was considered the writer who had
brought the realistic novel to its highest peak of achievement. Born
in the United States, James had spent much of his adult life in
Europe, often depicting in his fictions the contrast between American
and European character types. His novel </span><i>The Bostonians</i><span>
explored how the zeal of Massachusetts Puritanism found expression in
the movement for women’s emancipation.</span></span><p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span>In 1913, friends of James had
commissioned </span><a href="https://www.johnsingersargent.org/">John Singer
Sargent</a><span> (1856-1925), a respected American portrait and landscape
artist, also a </span><a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/21429">chronicler
of the transatlantic social scene</a><span> (and friend of James) to paint
James’s portrait in celebration of his 70</span><sup>th</sup><span> birthday.
After approximately 10 sittings, the oil portrait was completed to
James’s satisfaction (he declared it “</span><a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw03436/Henry-James">a
living breathing likeness</a><span>”), and was exhibited for the first
time in early May, 1914 at the Royal Academy in London, a prestigious
and storied privately funded centre for the promotion of art.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj51kD02nlZNLW9NuW-dP973h-H1YylZMrMycxYfOYwuZNj9Ndib0dG0_0H8CI95Vu7BhSdGYbAuUcncRTQc4nlFYrB69Vo7sGEd7Qi407NHPOHQeXHM-G7csHMvd_izh73QHNgp-sIXxBMOmTVoVHlf21l8FgOvAx-BEw4avAMTFpg7AdVwSixb3Z_3Q/s2697/Henry_James_by_John_Singer_Sargent_cleaned%20copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2697" data-original-width="2111" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj51kD02nlZNLW9NuW-dP973h-H1YylZMrMycxYfOYwuZNj9Ndib0dG0_0H8CI95Vu7BhSdGYbAuUcncRTQc4nlFYrB69Vo7sGEd7Qi407NHPOHQeXHM-G7csHMvd_izh73QHNgp-sIXxBMOmTVoVHlf21l8FgOvAx-BEw4avAMTFpg7AdVwSixb3Z_3Q/w156-h200/Henry_James_by_John_Singer_Sargent_cleaned%20copy.jpg" width="156" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Henry James</td></tr></tbody></table><br /></span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">There, a “<a href="http://thedabbler.co.uk/2014/12/when-henry-james-was-attacked-by-a-suffragette-axewoman/">sweet-seeming
silver-haired</a>” older woman, suffragette Mary Aldham, attacked
it with her meat cleaver, breaking the glass over the picture and
making three deep gashes in the canvas, particularly around James’s
left eye and upper lip, before onlookers disarmed her. Her act was
only one of many suffragette attacks on works of art at various
English galleries, including the National Gallery of London, the
Birmingham Art Gallery, and London’s National Portrait Gallery.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">I have not found any source stating
that Mary Aldham attacked the James portrait because of James’s
literary work. She is quoted as saying in a letter that “[She]
tried to destroy a valuable picture because I wish to show the public
that they have no security for their property nor for their art
treasures until women are given their political freedom.” Curator
and lecturer <a href="https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/deeds-not-words-suffragettes-and">Helena
Bonett, in “Suffragettes and the Summer Exhibition,” </a>speculates
that “The portrait—painted by an elder statesman of the artistic
elite celebrating a well-established writer for his seventieth
birthday—was understood as representative of the social stagnation
that the suffragette movement was challenging.” Researcher Philip
McCouat, in “<a href="https://www.artinsociety.com/from-the-rokeby-venus-to-fascism-pt-1-why-did-suffragettes-attack-artworks.html">Why
Did Suffragettes Attack Artworks</a>?” thinks the subject matter of
the painting had “no special significance” beyond representing
male authority, and even asserts that “Henry James was seen as
having broadly sympathetic feminist views.”
</span></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span>Whatever James’s private views—almost
certainly </span><i>not</i><span> pro-feminist—he was definitely no public
supporter of feminism. In fact, his anti-feminist novel </span><i>The
Bostonians</i><span> is the most damningly comprehensive account of the
feminist movement ever written, one that should be known by every
anti-feminist in the world for its remarkable incisiveness and
predictive power. Henry James is a novelist’s novelist—stunningly
detailed and intricate—and not to every reader’s taste. For those
who do not wish to immerse themselves in his complex prose, a film
version of the novel </span><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086992/">does
exist</a><span>, though it doesn’t do justice to James’s presentation.
In the remainder of this essay, I will provide a flavor of the novel.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><i>The Bostonians</i> is essentially a
love triangle set in 1874 against the backdrop of Boston’s
progressivist culture. Two characters, Olive Chancellor, a wealthy
Boston feminist, and Basil Ransom, a southerner from Mississippi,
compete for the love of a beautiful and gifted younger woman, Verena
Tarrant. Verena is a platform speaker on the subject of women’s
rights; she was raised in a left-leaning family devoted to causes and
fads. Her father is a mesmeric healer, and her mother was an
anti-slavery activist. One of the first things that Verena tells her
new friend Olive is that she believes in “free unions,” in other
words, in the doctrine of free love. She has been immersed since
earliest childhood in all the most enlightened emancipationist
theories.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Olive Chancellor is not a free love
adherent. She is a descendent of the Puritans, a representative of
the austere, absolutist wing of feminism with a strong lesbian
undercurrent. Some of the most fascinating scenes in the novel, for
our purposes, describe the intoxicating fervor at the core of
feminist ideology as Olive presents it to Verena. Of course, a novel
is not, a simple mirror onto reality: it is a representation that
encodes its author’s biases and idiosyncrasies. But James’s view
certainly seems, in my opinion, staggeringly accurate in its grasp of
the pleasures and perils of victimhood ideology.
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Before we even meet Olive in the novel,
we hear a description of her by her sister. “She’s a female
Jacobin,” she says to Basil, comparing Olive to the French
revolutionaries who slaughtered their political opponents in the
thousands. “Whatever is, is wrong, and all that sort of thing,”
Olive’s sister summarizes flippantly.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">And this assessment isn’t
particularly unfair. Olive Chancellor is, the narrator tells us early
on, “a woman without laughter” (p. 15) so passionate is her
commitment to her cause. We learn that her heart is filled with
images of suffering women for whom she imagines she has been “born
to lead a crusade” (p. 33), and James’s description makes clear
how her total identification with this imagined masse of
ever-persecuted women blots out all other understandings of history.
Here is one such description of her:</span></p>
<blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">“The unhappiness of women! The voice
of their silent suffering was always in her ears, the ocean of tears
that they had shed from the beginning of time seemed to pour through
her own eyes. Ages of oppression had rolled over them; uncounted
millions had lived only to be tortured, to be crucified. They were
her sisters, they were her own, and the day of their delivery had
dawned.” (p. 33)</span></p></blockquote>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">This is the vision that Olive presents
to Verena in order to indoctrinate in her the same single-minded
fervency.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The novel shows how together, Olive and
Verena find “a source of fortifying emotion [gained from] the
history of feminine anguish,” which they peruse, we are told,
“perpetually and zealously” (174). They dwell on the idea of
female suffering until that is the only reality: “All the bullied
wives, the stricken mothers, the dishonoured, deserted maidens who
have lived on the earth” (p. 174-175). Their deep empathy with
female suffering throughout history becomes all-consuming.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">James highlights the fanaticism and
hatred in Olive’s worldview, which is based on the false idea that
<i>only</i> women have suffered and that <i>only</i> men have caused,
and even taken pleasure in, that suffering: “[Olive] had made up
her mind that it was women, in the end, who had paid for everything.”
(p. 175)
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">This belief that only women have
suffered is contradicted in Olive’s own personal life. Born of a
wealthy Boston family, she has been extremely well educated, occupies
a respected position in her society, has never had to work for her
living, never been under any compulsion to marry, and never been
mistreated by any man. Her two brothers both lost their lives in the
American Civil War, fighting on the northern side. Her cousin—and
eventual rival—Basil Ransom risked his life in the same war on the
southern side and lost everything in consequence. But the reality of
male suffering is immaterial for Olive in contrast to the luminous
power of the feminist narrative.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">It is a vision so totalizing and sacred
that it can demand any retribution against men; the novel again
evokes the language of bloody revolution to emphasize Olive’s
yearning for avenging justice. She thinks,
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">“This was the only sacred cause; this
was the great, the just revolution. It must triumph, it must sweep
everything before it; it must exact from the other, the brutal,
bloodstained, ravening race, the last particle of expiation!” (p.
33).</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The novel shows how Olive tells and
retells to Verena the story of female victimhood until Verena too,
though never quite as convinced as Olive, at last agrees that men
deserve to suffer:
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">“Olive poured forth these views to
her listening and responsive friend; she presented them again and
again, and there was no light in which they did not seem to palpitate
with truth. Verena was immensely wrought upon; a subtle fire passed
into her; she was not so hungry for revenge as Olive, but at the last
[…] she quite agreed with her companion that after so many ages of
wrong […], men must take their turn, men must pay!” (p. 175-176).
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Thus James puts his finger on the
psychology of the nineteenth-century feminist movement, showing how
feminist conviction is passed from one woman to another through the
distorted reimagining of the past as a record of everlasting female
suffering and brutal male subjugation.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">And James takes the analysis further,
showing how Olive’s belief in female persecution not only justifies
any punishment against the enemy man but also excuses women from
whatever bad actions women might themselves commit. As she imagines
it, women have already “paid the price” for wrongdoing “in
advance.” James here encapsulates the peculiar logic of feminist
attributions of guilt and innocence, whereby women are always already
innocent because of their alleged past sufferings—and remain
innocent indefinitely into the future.
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">“[Olive] was willing to admit that
women, too could be bad; that there were many about the world who
were false, immoral, vile. But their errors were as nothing to their
sufferings; they had expiated, in advance, an eternity, if need be,
of misconduct.” (p. 175)
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Here James shows how feminism leads to
remarkable distortions of individual morality based on group
membership; whatever a man does as an individual, he is always
already guilty; whatever a woman does, she is always innocent. So
much for First Wave Feminism being about equality.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In opposition to Olive, the novel pits
Basil Ransom, an impoverished southerner who has come north to make a
career in law. He can offer Verena little other than his sexual love
and his own compellingly masculine, determined self, complete with
his rock-steady conviction that the dogma Verena has been taught is
nothing more than “third-rate palaver” (308). Basil feels no
inclination to apologize for being male; neither, as a Stoic, does he
protest the injustices and sufferings of men. But he is alarmed by
his recognition that “the masculine tone is passing out of the
world” (322). Here is what he says to Verena about the change he
sees in American culture:</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">“I am so far from thinking, as you
set forth the other night, that there is not enough woman in our
general life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is
a great deal too much. The whole generation is womanized; the
masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a
nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow
phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled
sensibilities […]. The masculine character, the ability to dare and
endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the
face and take it for what it is […], that is what I want to
preserve, or rather, as I may say, to recover.” (p. 322)</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In place of feminist platitudes, Basil
proposes to Verena the “old truths”: that “We are born to
suffer and to bear it, like decent people” (222). No movement can
abolish suffering, but fantastical beliefs about male evil and female
moral superiority can destroy what is good and necessary between men
and women. Most of all, Basil believes that Verena has been deceived
into devoting her life to a sham. He tells her that she is “made
for love,” and that “In the presence of a man she should really
care for,” the false ideology she has embraced “would rattle to
her feet” (319). We learn later that “The words he had spoken to
her […] had sunk into her soul and worked and fermented there”
until they “had kindled a light in which she saw herself afresh”
(370). She is transformed by her understanding of what it means to be
loved, as a woman, by a man. And that, the novel suggests, is more
powerful than feminist fantasy, at least for a woman who is herself
capable of love. For the Olive Chancellors of the world, the novel
suggests, there is no redemption.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span>Perhaps the suffragette with her meat
cleaver hated James’s romantic ending; or perhaps it was simply
chance that she chose to attack his picture. After the incident, the
elderly novelist </span><a href="https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/james/3">wrote
to a friend</a><span> that his attacker “got me thrice over before the
tomahawk was stayed. I naturally feel very scalped and disfigured.”
He also courteously </span><a href="https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/james/3">wrote
to a librarian</a><span> that he owed “the vicious hag” “a good mark
for having led to my hearing from you.”</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Philosophical and witty as always,
though not averse to calling a “hag” a “hag,” James was
uninterested in the opportunity for victim posturing the occasion
might have offered. And fortunately, the portrait was able to be
repaired.
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">A decade and a half after suffragettes
made their raids on British art galleries, the leader of the
suffragettes, <a href="https://www.meisterdrucke.us/fine-art-prints/Arthur-George-Walker/916815/Statue-of-Emmeline-Pankhurst-(1857-1928)-1930-(bronze).html">Emmeline
Pankhurst</a>, <a href="https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/deeds-not-words-suffragettes-and">was
memorialized in bronze by sculptor Arthur George Walker, and
displayed in the 1929 and 1930 Summer Exhibitions of the Royal
Academy</a>. The woman who had incited and refused to criticize
suffragette destruction of art was now welcomed into the gallery as a
subject of art. As was often the case, the allegedly ever-repressive
patriarchy found itself ill-equipped to respond except with
understanding and conciliation to the hysterical claims and unseemly
actions of ideologically possessed feminist women, and soon the great
fortress of presumed conservatism, the Royal Academy, was celebrating
one of its most vociferous enemies.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">This is what happened generally in the
twentieth century, as every bastion of the patriarchy admitted women,
often feminist women, who did not by any means stop their attacks on
the culture men had built, and who set about transforming every
institution they infiltrated until each one became appropriately
apologetic and hostile to male ways of being.
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Henry James could have predicted this
too. He saw feminism’s implacable anger and its conviction of
female blamelessness early on. In James’s artistic assessment, only
an unapologetic, loving refusal of feminism and resurrection of
masculinity could ever hope to defeat it.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> Janice Fiamengo</span></p><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span></div>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-41740978172767636912022-05-02T11:38:00.002-04:002022-05-02T11:38:56.024-04:00The White Feather Campaign<p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">It
is sometimes assumed that at times of war, men become vitally
important, and women stop taking them for granted. But history shows
that even or especially at times of crisis, many women express hatred
for men and contemptuous demands for their sacrifice, as became clear
during the First World War in Britain.</span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y29jTZNiWH0" width="320" youtube-src-id="Y29jTZNiWH0"></iframe></span></div><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /><span><a name='more'></a></span><span><br /></span></span><p></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>The
British suffragettes who held their country hostage over voting
rights for women have been glorified by modern feminists, who have
minimized or justified suffragette violence in the years leading up
to the First World War. But most feminists have been silent about
these same women’s involvement in the White Feather Campaign during
the war, when thousands of women across Britain participated in a
mass shaming ritual designed to force men to enlist. The evidence of
these women’s indifference to male suffering and their pleasure in
crusades of sexual humiliation was so stark that to this day many
feminists refuse to acknowledge the </span></span><a href="https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/White-Feather-Movement/"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>White
Feather Movement</span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>.</span></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">The
campaign to embarrass men into joining the war was inaugurated in the
English port town of Folkstone on August 30, 1914. Admiral Charles
Penrose Fitzgerald, elderly retiree from the Royal Navy, was deeply
committed to the war against Germany, which Britain had entered
earlier that month, on August 4</span><sup>th</sup><span face="Arial, sans-serif">.</span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Inspired
by a now-obscure but then popular 1902 novel called </span><i>The Four
Feathers</i><span face="Arial, sans-serif">, Fitzgerald organized thirty Folkstone women to hand out
white feathers to men who were not in military uniform. The white
feather was given in recognition of the man’s alleged cowardice or
shirking.</span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>According
to Professor of Philosophy Kimberly Baxter (“</span></span><a href="https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/newsletter/posts/2016/2016-08-15-Baxter.html"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Humiliation
or Death: the White Feather Campaign</span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>”),
the white feather as symbol “originated from the belief that a
white tail feather was a sign of inferior breeding in a rooster bred
for cockfighting.” To show a white feather, therefore, was to show
one’s unfitness for combat. In the afore-mentioned novel, a young
military officer is sent three white feathers by his fellow officers
after he resigns from the army in anticipation of an upcoming battle;
the fourth feather is given him by his repulsed fiancé when she
returns his engagement ring.</span></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Admiral
Fitzgerald, in organizing the White Feather Brigade, is reported to
have said of the men of his country that a danger awaited them far
more terrible than anything they could meet in battle: the danger,
clearly, of a woman’s sexual contempt. Any man not willing to risk
his life for his country was considered undeserving of the sexual
love and public respect of the women of his homeland.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>The
practice of giving white feathers quickly spread to other towns and
was enthusiastically adopted by women across Great Britain. There is
no way of knowing the precise number of women who participated in the
campaign, but as journalist Will Ellsworth Jones showed in his
account of conscientious objectors during the First World War (</span></span><a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Will-Not-Fight-Conscientious-Objectors/dp/1845133005"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span><i>We
Will Not Fight: The Untold Story of WWI’s Conscientious Objectors</i></span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>),
white feather activists must have numbered in the thousands and quite
possibly in the tens of thousands.</span></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>The
campaign went on for the entirety of the war’s four and a half
years, even after the British government introduced compulsory
service through conscription in 1916 (the </span></span><a href="https://www.historyhit.com/conscription-in-world-war-one-explained/"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Military
Service Bill</span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>
allowed the conscription of unmarried men aged 18-41; subsequently
extended to include married men up to the age of 50), which clearly
obviated any need to “encourage” volunteer enlistment.</span></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>The
feathers were distributed with unseemly abandon. Historian </span></span><a href="https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/White-Feather-Movement/"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Jessica
Brain recounts</span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>
the case of Seaman George Samson, who was given a white feather as he
was traveling to receive the Victoria Cross, his country’s highest
and most prestigious award for valour in battle. Army veteran Reuben
Farrow, home from the front after having had his hand blown off, was
accosted by a woman demanding why he was failing to do his patriotic
duty; she left him alone after he showed her the stump where his hand
had been (see “</span></span><a href="https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/White-Feather-Movement/"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>The
White Feather Movement</span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>”).</span></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Evidence
of how widespread white feather giving was is found in newspaper
accounts of the period as well as in diaries and published memoirs by
soldiers who had direct experience of white-feather-wielding women.
Professor Nicoletta Gullace, a feminist historian of the war years,
mentions the abundant primary sources, including “a collection of
remarkable letters sent to the BBC by old soldiers forty-five years
after the armistice, describing this painful experience to
researchers compiling an anniversary special on the history of the
Great War” (see her online article “</span></span><a href="https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/essays/gullace-white-feathers/index.html"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>White
Feathers and Wounded Men: Female Patriotism and the Memory of the
Great War</span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>”).</span></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Even
the British government was prompted to intervene in a futile attempt
to curtail the insistent harassment.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Officials
issued “King and Empire” badges to be worn by men employed in
home-front occupations essential to the war effort; they also created
a Silver War Badge for wounded veterans in order to shield them from
white feather aggressors. Nevertheless, the hounding of British men
continued right to the end of the war, becoming one of the most
rancorous war-time memories of soldiers and other men.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The
fact that women continued to hand out feathers long after there was
any plausible justification for it, and that they did so with
complete indiscriminateness, often targeting underage boys, men home
on leave from the Front, or men who had been maimed in battle,
demonstrated that much more than misguided patriotism was involved.
War mania itself does not seem adequate to account for the intensity
and personal nature of the fervor these women displayed as they
roamed the streets looking for male civilians. Even Emmeline
Pankhurst, who had spent years in self-immolating ecstasy over
women’s right to vote, abandoned the suffrage cause in order to
dedicate herself to the male-shaming project.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">In
essence, the White Feather Brigade became a much-relished opportunity
for women to express their sexual and moral power over men, and to
demonstrate their exultation in symbolic rejection of those men they
deemed inadequate. It was an opportunity to insult men with impunity,
and to wound men with a psychological violence equal to or greater
than a death blow itself.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Not
all men objected to the practice; some shrugged it off or even
laughed about it. </span></span><a href="https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/essays/gullace-white-feathers/index.html"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Professor
Gullace tells</span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>
of a seventeen-year-old boy, H. Symonds, who wrote after the war of
his experience of accepting a white feather from a pretty
ginger-haired girl who had been making a recruiting speech at Hyde
Park Corner in London.</span></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Already
eager to join up, he went to the recruiting office with the white
feather she had given him still in his button-hole, and lied about
his age in order to enlist immediately. Three or four days later, he
returned in his military uniform to Hyde Park, where the same
ginger-haired young woman recognized and approached him, asking for
the White Feather back and giving him a kiss in its place. For this
young man, white feather bullying was an expression of the natural
order that he accepted with equanimity.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Many
other men, however, especially those who were injured or knew those
who had been, told stories of hostile encounters on trains or in
public streets as late as 1917 or 1918 in which the cruelty and
willed ignorance of White Feather women seemed almost beyond
comprehension.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Some
of these men felt compelled to display their mutilated bodies in
order to shame the women for their obliviousness to heroic male
suffering. There are even a few accounts of men slapping women across
the face for their impudence, an action normally forbidden to any
man. Some men carried deep anger for many years on behalf of friends
or relatives who were sent to their deaths by feather-bearing women.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>One,
G. Backhaus, told of a sixteen-year-old cousin who was so traumatized
by repeated taunts from white feather women that he lied about his
age in order to get to the front, and was promptly killed. The
“cruelty of the White Feather business,” this man declared,
deserved to be far more thoroughly exposed (see “</span></span><a href="https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/essays/gullace-white-feathers/index.html"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>White
Feathers and Wounded Men</span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>”).
</span></span>
</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Some
women were outraged too. One man remembered how his mother, whose
father died in the war when she was 9, never got over her sense of
betrayal, remembering it even in her 80s. She blamed the politicians
and the generals, but most of all she blamed “that unknown woman
who gave him the white feather, and the thousands of brittle,
self-righteous women all over the country who had done the same”
(</span></span><a href="https://historyoffeminism.com/white-feather-campaign-second-world-war/"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span><i>History
of Feminism</i></span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>).</span></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Feminist
commentators have tended to downplay the popularity of the movement
or emphasize women’s limited agency.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif">Feminist
novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf insisted many years after the
war that the White Feather Movement had been grossly exaggerated by
misogynistic men to put women in a bad light. Woolf was convinced,
without any evidence other than her own belief, that “The number of
[…] women who stuck feathers in coats must have been infinitesimal
compared with those who did nothing of the kind.” She estimated
that some men were making a fuss about fifty or sixty feathers in
total (see Woolf, </span><i>Three Guineas</i><span face="Arial, sans-serif">, p. 182). This is a
straight-out fantasy.</span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Feminist
historian </span></span><a href="https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/essays/gullace-white-feathers/index.html"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Nicoletta
Gullace</span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>
is scrupulous about the real numbers, but focuses on mitigating
women’s white feather activism, seeing the woman as backed into a
corner by cultural trends over which they had little control. In her
otherwise compelling account of the white feather movement, Gullace
reveals her deep feminist bias when she has the gall to suggest that
men’s anger over the practice was unjustified, describing men’s
white feather stories as “an aggressive articulation of masculinity
that claimed for those who suffered exclusive custody over the
interpretation of the war.” How dare the men think that their war
experience took priority over whatever the women had thought and
felt. Men’s expressions of anger strike Gullace as unfair because
they allegedly neglect “the larger cultural context that explained
[the] women’s actions” (“</span></span><a href="https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/essays/gullace-white-feathers/index.html"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>White
Feathers and Wounded Men</span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>”).</span></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Canadian
historian </span></span><a href="http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/151/the-white-feather-campaign-a-struggle-with-masculinity-during-world-war-i"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>Peter
J. Hart</span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>
offers another sympathetic explanation, which is that the campaign
gratified the women who participated because it “allowed them to
gain power over the men who usually ruled them.” This is a
typically gynophilic excuse for women’s abuse of power on the
grounds that they didn’t actually have the power they so flagrantly
abused.</span></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>But
other explanations for the women’s actions are also well worth
considering. Researcher Robin Mac Donald (see “</span></span><a href="http://itech.fgcu.edu/&/issues/vol1/issue1/feather.htm"><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>White
Feather Feminism: The Recalcitrant Progeny of Radical Suffragism and
Conservative Pro-War Britain</span></span></a><span face="Arial, sans-serif"><span>”)
has emphasized the overlap in membership between the militant
suffragettes who belonged to the Women’s Social and Political Union
(WSPU) and those women who later joined the White Feather Brigade.
The leaders of the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter
Christabel, became passionate recruiters for the war, and most of
their supporters followed them.</span></span></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The
two movements seem rather different—one was radically in opposition
to the government and to conservative society; the other was
patriotic and supportive of the government—but both offered the
opportunity for the unleashing of female rage in an allegedly
altruistic cause. The “sex war” energy of suffragette activism
was transferred to the war effort with the same deep anti-male
antagonism as its impetus. The tactics of both campaigns were
designed to expose male inadequacy and legitimize female assaults on
men’s psyches and the wilful imperilling of male bodies. Both
movements, in essence, were propelled by exterminationist female
anger.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The
final year of the war brought an at least partial victory for the
suffragettes when women aged 30 and above were granted the right to
vote in British parliamentary elections—largely in response to
women’s factory work during the war years.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">But
that victory came at a massive cost, certainly in male lives and male
suffering—with 700,000 dead and many more thousands severely
injured, many permanently incapacitated—and also, not
insignificantly, in the loss of male trust in women’s love.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">For
a considerable number of men, the war had brought two enemies into
their lives: one on the battlefield, the other on the home front. The
cost for men was so undeniable, and the evidence of female betrayal
so staggering, that almost all feminist historians have assiduously
covered over the reality of the war years, emphasizing instead the
injustice to female factory workers who were quickly displaced by
soldiers returning home after the war.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Women’s
White Feather activism during the war provides vivid evidence that
some significant number of women were more than willing to force
their own menfolk with jeers and contempt into harm’s way. No
excuse-making or claims of female victimhood can justify their cruel
pleasure.</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> Janice Fiamengo</span></p><p style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6028739013844277402.post-28601337088390629202022-04-21T15:16:00.002-04:002022-04-21T15:16:10.408-04:00The Incendiary Rage of the Suffragettes<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">The British suffragettes are now
lionized as self-sacrificing activists who won the vote for women in
Great Britain. In fact, they probably delayed the granting of woman
suffrage with their violence, and they offer a case study in the mass
hysteria, longing for martyrdom, and narcissistic indifference to
other people that so often characterize dangerous zealots.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="180" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wVPmoVZCFrA" width="320" youtube-src-id="wVPmoVZCFrA"></iframe></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br />From the time of its founding in 1903
until 1914, the Women’s Social and Political Union, the radical arm
of the early 20<sup>th</sup> century British feminist movement,
became an increasingly violent organization that distinguished itself
from other women’s groups of the time by living up to its ominous
motto “Deeds, not Words.”</span><div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div><span><a name='more'></a></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"></span><p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfzRr9MMoz86e8NLTgQqv0TuJNggKH0CByUn0PI2fKVZE_z6nGbDlbGi0sGqI6Ppa-zZ72cgb-wcjWLdSIX__tbukJaAoo5p7ngo6AmuxU1AP0fCwp7WW0R5lKs8HUlu0CRxFzKyhriD7A8AltaiKxltwas-pY7H1bKwDeVWBLnHHHI6UNBcr9tbueCA/s620/p01.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="372" data-original-width="620" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfzRr9MMoz86e8NLTgQqv0TuJNggKH0CByUn0PI2fKVZE_z6nGbDlbGi0sGqI6Ppa-zZ72cgb-wcjWLdSIX__tbukJaAoo5p7ngo6AmuxU1AP0fCwp7WW0R5lKs8HUlu0CRxFzKyhriD7A8AltaiKxltwas-pY7H1bKwDeVWBLnHHHI6UNBcr9tbueCA/w400-h240/p01.png" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br />Though now largely remembered for
innocuous <i>deeds</i> such as hunger strikes in prison, members of
the WSPU were in reality responsible for a bombing and arson campaign
that brought enormous destruction and terror across the British isles
and involved hundreds of militants. The fact that these women, dubbed
suffragettes, believed they could get away with their violence and
that they did get away with it—in that they are now widely regarded
as victim-heroines—offers shocking proof of the power of feminist
ideology, then and now.<br />
</span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRuBPeZUznOcaRS_we7qO0JyOaPwpvTuCVAvUIXPo9kYipc-1Og_s-k580kA876e8-3yC3XhXl1PjZfK1PZf8JSed42I2LYdpDSrwDvvwcqR50rK0aIHbsUpF1syIENRiPBsXrsNm38AS9ZcZ-9iNYKRJp0HNCD7uN0Q_j6FBC6Fg4ZP61EwViYLcdhQ/s1004/p02.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1004" data-original-width="610" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRuBPeZUznOcaRS_we7qO0JyOaPwpvTuCVAvUIXPo9kYipc-1Og_s-k580kA876e8-3yC3XhXl1PjZfK1PZf8JSed42I2LYdpDSrwDvvwcqR50rK0aIHbsUpF1syIENRiPBsXrsNm38AS9ZcZ-9iNYKRJp0HNCD7uN0Q_j6FBC6Fg4ZP61EwViYLcdhQ/w121-h200/p02.png" width="121" /></a></div><p></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: arial;">The charismatic leader of the
suffragettes was Emmeline Pankhurst, a comfortably middle-class widow
of a radical lawyer who had grown tired of the slow pace of
democratic reform in her homeland. It was irrelevant to Pankhurst
that British political culture was undergoing massive democratization
and that getting a bill for woman suffrage passed through Parliament
was a complicated process. It was irrelevant to her that most
working-class men in her country still lacked the right to vote; she
wasn’t interested in working-class enfranchisement at all.
Moreover, she was indifferent to the issues facing the British
government in the early years of the 20</span><sup style="font-family: arial;">th</sup><span style="font-family: arial;"> century, which
included the threat of civil war in Ireland over Irish independence,
colonial rebellion in India, and deep discontent among the working
poor.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvYtLLJntHnuWFCa5kZjDD965lJ7uREnMBFI5GtXXYZfPo4dOBCQ8br7EOhNSd1-qoUEXH4GUTKiidlxMvtH1X6_lwOH_2DOFtom8DnsR_URIKsruswm0n8nqDev8dGauCoxPZ-Zzy8qr3jWk40iNhaON8iVh_EUWcXqbxv_RdpuWSq-l24TwQ3znTfw/s1920/a-suffragette-my-own-story-illustrated.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1920" data-original-width="1200" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvYtLLJntHnuWFCa5kZjDD965lJ7uREnMBFI5GtXXYZfPo4dOBCQ8br7EOhNSd1-qoUEXH4GUTKiidlxMvtH1X6_lwOH_2DOFtom8DnsR_URIKsruswm0n8nqDev8dGauCoxPZ-Zzy8qr3jWk40iNhaON8iVh_EUWcXqbxv_RdpuWSq-l24TwQ3znTfw/w125-h200/a-suffragette-my-own-story-illustrated.jpg" width="125" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Pankhurst’s sense of the injustice
she was suffering dwarfed all. Under her command, the Women’s
Social and Political Union went from heckling politicians and
smashing shop windows to the far more belligerent techniques of
guerilla warfare that accelerated in the years leading up to the
First World War.<br />
</span><p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Pankhurst and her fanatical followers
were so convinced of the righteousness of their cause and so
confident that, whatever occurred, they could portray themselves as
valiant victims that they seem to have cared nothing about the costs
of their incendiary crusade, which included ruinous attacks on
centuries-old churches and other priceless historical buildings as
well as on countless small businesses and shops; and led to serious
personal injuries to the mostly working class men who became their
collateral damage.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">A full history of the suffragettes
cannot be covered here. For a detailed overview of suffragette
terrorism, see Simon Webb’s book <a href="https://www.amazon.ca/Suffragette-Bombers-Britains-Forgotten-Terrorists/dp/1526796678"><i>The
Suffragette Bombers: Britain’s Forgotten Terrorists</i></a>, from
which I draw heavily, and William Collins’ video series <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvJKGdvz8EE&list=PLTrw87fRWXmI9P1M2AKvC22KL3U5GooJJ&index=11"><i>Centuries
of Oppression</i></a>.
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: arial;">One of the first of the suffragettes’
militant strategies was setting fire to letter boxes and postal
outlets; in theory, it sounds fairly harmless. As Simon Webb
demonstrates, however, it was both a politically useless and
dangerous method of attracting attention (</span><i style="font-family: arial;">The Suffragette Bombers</i><span style="font-family: arial;">,
p. 41). Suffragettes employed a concoction of phosphorus and
sulphuric acid which, when poured into postal boxes, adhered to
letters and later interacted with the air to create combustion.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Many packages and letters, in the
process of being poured out of bags for sorting in postal offices,
suddenly burst into flame. Such fires became common in the years 1912
to 1914, causing painful burns to the hands of postal workers and
threatening them with permanent lung damage from the phosphorus. One
mailbag on a train compartment exploded with such intensity that the
train car began to burn, and a postal worker sustained severe
injuries throwing the burning letter bags out of the railway
compartment (<i>The Suffragette Bombers</i>, p. 41).
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-size: large; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3am07psrm6bhDTN1D5EBRekD_nJJMSrhO1jIeyzoUNrcN8W7pqtz0ntFmiwefyTWXO84LwaMEcxTVrL2eRwqHPuQ8y82WMlj0VmCD_0LRr_l9IqkkuOKJqTOI_cHsuoQr8H8qgHXlQZ1rm42W64lXtadS0RPRXTe0wLc5X0ROQZD4hUsKYzCpZOAC1w/s600/p07.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="376" data-original-width="600" height="251" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3am07psrm6bhDTN1D5EBRekD_nJJMSrhO1jIeyzoUNrcN8W7pqtz0ntFmiwefyTWXO84LwaMEcxTVrL2eRwqHPuQ8y82WMlj0VmCD_0LRr_l9IqkkuOKJqTOI_cHsuoQr8H8qgHXlQZ1rm42W64lXtadS0RPRXTe0wLc5X0ROQZD4hUsKYzCpZOAC1w/w400-h251/p07.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">Suffragettes also chose far more
spectacular targets, burning many large country homes across England,
Scotland, and Northern Ireland. One such target was a house being
built for Member of Parliament David Lloyd George, in South-East
England. Just before the workmen were to arrive one morning in
February, 1913, a bomb brought down the ceilings and blew out the
windows (</span><span style="font-size: medium;"><i style="font-family: arial;">The Suffragette Bombers</i><span style="font-family: arial;">, p. 44). Many country homes
were completely destroyed by suffragette fires.</span></span><p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Other high-profile targets in the years
1912 to 1914 included the Bank of England, St. Catherine’s Church
in London, St. Mary’s Church in Whitekirk, Scotland, Britannia Pier
in Yarmouth, Aberuchill Castle in Scotland, St. Paul’s Cathedral in
London, the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, Westminster Abbey, and
Rosslyn Chapel. Suffragettes also chose more practical and strategic
targets, including railway stations, canals, greenhouses, aqueducts,
dockyards, military barracks, refreshment buildings, bridges, golf
course and lawn-bowling pavilions, sports facilities, and hotels, to
name only the most common. For well over two years, the bombings and
arson attacks were near-constant.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Historians and commentators, almost all
of them sympathetic to the suffragettes, tend to gloss over this
violence or omit it from their accounts altogether. Feminist
Professor of English Jane Marcus makes not one mention of bombs in
her introduction to a book titled <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203708828/suffrage-pankhursts-jane-marcus"><i>Suffrage
and the Pankhursts</i></a>, which glorifies Emmeline and her daughter
Christabel, and tells readers that “The real key to the genius of
militant suffrage” was the feminist practice of interrupting male
politicians’ speeches, which Marcus claims was a revolutionary
technique by which each woman learned “not only to speak in her own
voice for her own cause, but to split asunder patriarchal cultural
hegemony by interrupting men’s discourse with each other”
(Marcus, p. 9). An uninformed reader will come away from Marcus’s
commentary believing that the suffragettes gained their notoriety
entirely through verbal confrontations and self-sacrifice.
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">More responsible commentators can’t
avoid mentioning the bombs, but emphasize that the suffragettes
attacked property rather than people—damaging and expensive,
certainly—in fact, causing damage in the millions of British pounds
in today’s currency--but not first-order violence. Simon Webb
points out the dishonesty of such a characterization, noting that if
the owners themselves were not in residence in most of the large
country houses, many domestic staff members were, living in the
servants’ quarters to maintain the properties. Suffragette attacks
showed blatant disregard for the lives of these voteless
working-class people. Rarely mentioned also are the countless numbers
of these servants as well as shop owners, their employees, and other
workers who were left without any means of earning a living as a
result of suffragettes’ actions (<i>The Suffragette Bombers</i>, p.
42-43).</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGJUb12B8qF9LzxZPIUjvNsyvre-B4cpM5TsvjSs34K_y3o41udiwZPnIGtcClMB4QIzsNDb-VRcOrfJzsvydDy8YsfOMUBPxyyB3UzAjkjgtWhTYDZdu9O6_2Cn-ofbryoSUboY39DTH84_4XKHDfvHucuTxy6HFpl_tI7tilDqe-G-6BGAw0rgQYvw/s962/38829300-9209667-Webb_in_The_Suffragette_Bombers_Britain_s_Forgotten_Terrorists_p-a-3_1612368295140.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="641" data-original-width="962" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGJUb12B8qF9LzxZPIUjvNsyvre-B4cpM5TsvjSs34K_y3o41udiwZPnIGtcClMB4QIzsNDb-VRcOrfJzsvydDy8YsfOMUBPxyyB3UzAjkjgtWhTYDZdu9O6_2Cn-ofbryoSUboY39DTH84_4XKHDfvHucuTxy6HFpl_tI7tilDqe-G-6BGAw0rgQYvw/w400-h266/38829300-9209667-Webb_in_The_Suffragette_Bombers_Britain_s_Forgotten_Terrorists_p-a-3_1612368295140.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><p></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Direct violence against people was part
of the suffragettes’ campaign also. In July of 1912, an attack
occurred against Prime Minister Herbert Asquith when he was riding in
an open carriage through the city of Dublin with Irish nationalist MP
John Redmond to commemorate an Irish Home Rule Bill. As the vehicle
made its way through the crowds, a suffragette threw a hatchet at
Asquith’s face, which sliced through John Redmond’s cheek and
ear. On the following day, suffragettes attacked a full theatre in
which Asquith was scheduled to speak, pouring petrol on carpets and
curtains and setting them alight, and also detonating several bombs
(<i>The Suffragette Bombers</i>, p. 61). In 1913, suffragettes
attempted to assassinate a magistrate, Henry Curtis-Bennett, with a
letter bomb, and when that failed, two suffragettes attempted to push
him off a cliff (p. 117-118).</span><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-tzk0J1EjWZwqjPs5WLcXoZM8p0ecXyBSphJrVPdUm-_heWnn8rqj8sBjWGCzsI1s69hWBTHtoGNcrcrleTHICqsof5bb3ImSjrUmmL4SwWbYx0K5bLWKMhTXZKdqb9ko1u8RjrlYZQvB_nBAwX6CZCuokVTYCdp_JkyNeNOJVtD0-SNAVnOnsgszFw/s1501/2019_10_asquith_opener_crop.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1501" data-original-width="1441" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-tzk0J1EjWZwqjPs5WLcXoZM8p0ecXyBSphJrVPdUm-_heWnn8rqj8sBjWGCzsI1s69hWBTHtoGNcrcrleTHICqsof5bb3ImSjrUmmL4SwWbYx0K5bLWKMhTXZKdqb9ko1u8RjrlYZQvB_nBAwX6CZCuokVTYCdp_JkyNeNOJVtD0-SNAVnOnsgszFw/w192-h200/2019_10_asquith_opener_crop.png" width="192" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Herbert Asquith</td></tr></tbody></table></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Through all of the destruction of
property, threat to livelihoods, and physical harm to innocent
bystanders, the suffragettes saw themselves as sacrificial heroines.
Like many terrorists, they envisioned their cause as pure enough to
justify nearly any level of violence and imagined themselves as
martyrs acting out of self-annihilating love.
</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">One of their main aims, in fact, in
addition to attracting attention was to provoke—men, in
particular—to commit violence against them, and then to publicize
the violence. Believing that as women they were involved in what they
had named a “sex war” (see, for example, Susan Kingsley Kent, <i>Sex
and Suffrage in Britain</i>, p. 158) they wanted that war so
blatantly manifested as to be undeniable. They wanted to be able to
display for all the world their own suffering bodies. And they were
able to in various ways.</span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVkQREzwWRnh0puY1vtGzue32wUkvhObnD8JaAkb3y6IutUfYFc3dcl5bU1eWfqVu9v5h6rPBF7o3PgNaXK4y-9-k14LiKWp5vDC_Gof0IbEjfRXsmfoBz1GAFwQMoFKWOgLlGZ-kf1-bzewnYFIYIs-Vl2NkyHCnfPC7o6GsZLqVD42td5vaPRgiDyQ/s1151/71B7DYIPEqL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1151" data-original-width="800" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVkQREzwWRnh0puY1vtGzue32wUkvhObnD8JaAkb3y6IutUfYFc3dcl5bU1eWfqVu9v5h6rPBF7o3PgNaXK4y-9-k14LiKWp5vDC_Gof0IbEjfRXsmfoBz1GAFwQMoFKWOgLlGZ-kf1-bzewnYFIYIs-Vl2NkyHCnfPC7o6GsZLqVD42td5vaPRgiDyQ/w139-h200/71B7DYIPEqL.jpg" width="139" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">As their bombing campaign continued,
the public mood not surprisingly turned against the suffragettes, and
WSPU meetings began to attract crowds of frustrated opponents. On
some occasions, angry crowds seized hold of suffragette speakers,
sometimes ejecting them from buildings where they had gathered; at
other times pelting speakers with bottles and bricks. In June of
1914, for example, an attempt to hold an outdoor meeting in North
London resulted in assaults on the speakers, and eggs and flour
thrown at those who had gathered to hear them (<i>The Suffragette
Bombers</i>, p. 149). The suffragettes exulted in the opportunity
such violence offered. It proved their point: that men were brutes,
and that only political power could enable women to purify public
life and to protect other women.<br />
</span><p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA2a6VhOfPzrM20ZrmnVNYMpECjDl-GTwE3cvLcdC1ijgzWT_ySwOiFMsD4dOmzIHB28GIX8lRwPC2XEehdtRmpZDWjTaJB7ELp3kqsol1W3pY6zv4ojT276ITOkDrv7hoFwkA9khdemUzI-rDbuyXqgoTzwLkHspVVcxijsXYwbILS5Dumghzjkk8Iw/s1193/p13.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1193" data-original-width="1000" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA2a6VhOfPzrM20ZrmnVNYMpECjDl-GTwE3cvLcdC1ijgzWT_ySwOiFMsD4dOmzIHB28GIX8lRwPC2XEehdtRmpZDWjTaJB7ELp3kqsol1W3pY6zv4ojT276ITOkDrv7hoFwkA9khdemUzI-rDbuyXqgoTzwLkHspVVcxijsXYwbILS5Dumghzjkk8Iw/w168-h200/p13.png" width="168" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Hunger strikes were another effective
propaganda technique. Suffragettes sent to prison for their criminal
offences regularly threatened to starve themselves to death in
protest. Emmeline Pankhurst herself boasted in public speeches that
authorities couldn’t keep her in prison because of her
hunger-striking (“Why We Are Militant,” Suffrage and the
Pankhurst, p. 162). The authorities were caught in the trap created
by the suffragettes’ victimhood posturing. Terrified by the thought
of any suffragette dying in prison, authorities enacted
counter-measures such as force-feeding or releasing hunger-weakened
prisoners until they were well and then re-arresting them, under a
law that came to be called the Cat and Mouse Act.</span></span><p></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcrG6EbBLAmsc6QT5R79zTiFjPL1ExejkDXIvKXE1kp0krQIrY0VETTcwnnUMpDp9h0U3kPAotpunM-f59gTwbv6mQ8rLe9fDEd737nGZQCoJZ3bkM8ra54VRCYUs04iQG0P8c3va8ql95z9pEBSSpDcwGVbwcHEtHBU8YO3sd7pYNWkzyPkq5K5_wXQ/s600/p12.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="390" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcrG6EbBLAmsc6QT5R79zTiFjPL1ExejkDXIvKXE1kp0krQIrY0VETTcwnnUMpDp9h0U3kPAotpunM-f59gTwbv6mQ8rLe9fDEd737nGZQCoJZ3bkM8ra54VRCYUs04iQG0P8c3va8ql95z9pEBSSpDcwGVbwcHEtHBU8YO3sd7pYNWkzyPkq5K5_wXQ/w130-h200/p12.png" width="130" /></a></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Both of these counter-measures were
effectively deployed by the suffragettes against the government. In
particular, the image of women being held down and forced to accept a
feeding tube became a graphic, grisly illustration of feminine
vulnerability and sinister state violence.
</span><p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;">Such images were exploited to the hilt
by suffragette campaigners and have lived on in the public memory as
emblems of feminist heroism.</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The most famous suffragette martyr of
all was Emily Davison, a graduate of the University of London and a
veteran WSPU terrorist. Her activities didn’t stop with
hunger-striking or post-box fires. She is believed to have been
centrally involved in the afore-mentioned firebombing of the house of
politician David Lloyd George, and she was arrested for attacking a
Baptist minister at a railway station because she thought he was the
hated David Lloyd George. Most famously, she is the woman who was
mortally injured as she rushed onto the racetrack at the Epsom Derby
in June of 1913 as the racehorses swept by.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFCmenGz5tZHDLOS-Y-l6NZKUmg57lvFbYh29YiRw8Q_nzwXbJV6vJMKcvbku93uUxKRPdODa49bJrMGvb6488m7dnpr6houM4WxyjRcs3i3lOgP8tX5bFoxIdi2mzmv0roYTKLex9WRLLsGGK-v_cFM9-JWRgeZKT3rdWCM2BcXki_xP5zK-6J3rMqQ/s1804/SH%20220421%206943.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1077" data-original-width="1804" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFCmenGz5tZHDLOS-Y-l6NZKUmg57lvFbYh29YiRw8Q_nzwXbJV6vJMKcvbku93uUxKRPdODa49bJrMGvb6488m7dnpr6houM4WxyjRcs3i3lOgP8tX5bFoxIdi2mzmv0roYTKLex9WRLLsGGK-v_cFM9-JWRgeZKT3rdWCM2BcXki_xP5zK-6J3rMqQ/w400-h239/SH%20220421%206943.png" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br />No one is sure whether Davison was
simply intent on a very public and gruesome self-destruction or
whether she was trying to grab hold of the reins of the King’s
horse, Anmar, possibly to pin a suffragette flag on them (<i>The
Suffragette Bombers</i>, p. 80). Whatever her reckless motive, she
was trampled under the horse, which somersaulted and landed on top of
the jockey, Herbert Jones, who himself narrowly escaped being killed.
The suffragettes turned Davison’s funeral parade into a dramatic
celebration of her martyrdom, claiming she had been driven to her
death by a cruel government. Over the past century, photographic
images of racecourse spectacle have become iconic of her tragic
nobility. In actuality, Emily Davison was a fanatical, irresponsible,
and violent person.
</span><p></p>
<p align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtxtum_Kq08wvABeEhOiAREKxov7zNLRyGViz5WWSALBKb4dMFKj8Bix2jKSPtUmHkAFUjE6TEoyvTorNDxom4Umpcxb4KvxrXy5mnQ0SOwGiJJaUpsmDOm2D750CRh6c6AhugDefXSMIHLKrGUAPfp-z5rfpnmtnpjCF1aW_LuzjRZGdpLo2gFn5u4A/s5363/Britain_Before_the_First_World_War_Q81834.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3896" data-original-width="5363" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtxtum_Kq08wvABeEhOiAREKxov7zNLRyGViz5WWSALBKb4dMFKj8Bix2jKSPtUmHkAFUjE6TEoyvTorNDxom4Umpcxb4KvxrXy5mnQ0SOwGiJJaUpsmDOm2D750CRh6c6AhugDefXSMIHLKrGUAPfp-z5rfpnmtnpjCF1aW_LuzjRZGdpLo2gFn5u4A/w400-h290/Britain_Before_the_First_World_War_Q81834.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br />The willingness of other suffragettes
to bomb churches and aqueducts for the cause, and a credulous public
now eager to see them as martyrs point to the vicious sentimentality
and attention-seeking that were integral to this much-celebrated
facet of the feminist movement.
</span><p></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> Ultimately, the suffragette campaign
ended inconclusively with the advent of the First World War. Though
the suffragettes were almost certainly responsible for making the
suffrage cause less popular and less practical than it would
otherwise have been, the suffragettes have been posthumously
sanctified as heroic crusaders for justice. Many of them in reality
were zealots so obsessed with their own alleged victimhood that they
went to war against the working people of their own country and
claimed to be doing it for “the betterment of the human race”
(“Why We are Militant,” speech by Emmeline Pankhurst, in <i>Suffrage
and the Pankhursts</i>, p. 162). One can hardly imagine a more
profound delusion, or one more representative of feminist theory and
practice. </span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"> Janice Fiamengo</span></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: arial; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><span face=""arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"></span></div></div>Steve Brulehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06972716903138109227noreply@blogger.com0